


My Haunting Heart

by Sing



Category: Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Genre: Abbie has powers, Abbie lives after this, Don't say I didn't warn you, Dreams, F/M, Gen, Grace's Journal, Haunting, He might very well be a bad guy, Her death here is hers, I don't know if there's a hero, I promise to be messy, I told you he might be bad, I'm not sure how this ends, In which I write a ghost story, Nightmares, Past Lives, Present lives, Rediscovering destiny, Restless spirits, Resurrection, Song fic, There may be ghosts, There might be suffering, Um....he might be a bad guy., You here for this ride?, You in this?, are you ready for this?, someones getting haunted
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-22
Updated: 2017-02-20
Packaged: 2018-08-23 21:47:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 28,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8344045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sing/pseuds/Sing
Summary: Abbie's spirit contends with Crane's grieving. And then she gets another chance---reborn to a new life. But what's past is not dead. What's past is a rising tide, that will either pull her under, or drag itself up on the shore.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I do not own Sleepy Hollow (that mess)
> 
> Song quoted is My Immortal by Evanesence. 
> 
> No: I do not accept her death.

She feels him calling for her, longing for her, always. Stretching taut the last remnants of her being across the veil. From life to death. From then to now.

Ignorance, to regret.

Now of all times they belong to the other more than ever. For he is hers now, his most welcome ghost, a spectre he courts. And she is his.

he will not let her go.

* * *

 

_I'm so tired of being, here._

 

In the house, he sees her, distant aloof, transparent pale, putting away the laundry.

 

_Suppressed by all my, childish fears_

 

In the house, she sees him. Watching her. Always watching her. She has never been Seen so much as now.

 

_Your face it haunts_

 

In her bed, resting her spirit the door creaks and he ambles toward the mattress, lays down, curling himself around the indent of her body, wanting so much more from the cold air that he flings his arm over.

 

_My once pleasant dreams._

_Your voice it takes away,_

_all the sanity in me._

 

She watches his rages

 

_These wounds won't seem to heal._

 

Hears his crying.

 

_This pain is just too real._

 

his continuous wailing.

 

_There's just too much that time cannot erase._

 

Watches him fall apart.

 

You chose this for us, she thinks, dashing away faint tears. You chose this.

 

_When you cried I'd, wipe away all of your tears_

_When you'd scream, I'd, fight away all of your fears,_

_and I held your, hand, for all of these years,_

_but you still, have,_

_All of me._

 

And she cannot leave. He tethers her here.

 

_You use to captivate me, by your resonating light_

 

He waits and prays for glimmers some days, an orb hovering by the window, turning to mist if he draws too near.

 

_Now I'm bound by the life you left behind._

 

She is everywhere. In the walls, in the floor, in his skin, under it. Behind his closed eyelids. Smiles and tears, and missed chances. Ruined ones. Waste. All of his infinite waste.

 

_And if you have to leave_

_I wish that you would just leave_

_your presence still lingers here_

 

 _Let me haunt in peace,_ she thinks. Wishing with all her soul that he would abandon here, her last refuge, her home, the way he did in life, that she can have it to herself, ruminate, accept and cross, but he continues to be the vexing selfish creature he is, haunting _her_ , in equal measure with his despair.

 

_And it won't leave me, alone_

_these wounds won't seem to heal_

_this pain is just too real_

_there's just too much that time cannot erase_

 

She shatters the windows

 

_When you cried I'd, wipe away all of your tears_

 

Cracks the mirror

 

_when you'd scream, I'd, fight away all of your fears_

 

Shows herself to him, a picture of vibrant health---a draining illusion to pull--but only to torment him, only to drive him to his brink, to wits end, to send him careening from the house.

 

_And I held your hand through all of these years_

 

She fills the air with shrill shrieking, accusing, voices.

 

_But you still have_

 

Yet he stays.

 

_All of me._

 

Side by side they sit, not touching, not speaking. Both of them ghosts of a sort. Both of them haunted.

 

_I try so hard to tell, my self, that, you're gone._

 

He turns down her picture one night. Futile attempt before he hurls it at a wall. Then sobs as he collects the glass. Caressing her likeness with bloody fingers.

 

She turns her face toward the moonlight, craving release to fly free, but feeling the weight of him still holding fast.

 

_But though you're still with me_

 

She leans her ghostly head on his shoulder, starlight fingers, cold, ethereal, toying with his, begging him to let her go. _Your love is no good to me now. This desperate devotion. I had to become nothing to be something to you? Let me go, Crane._ she instructs, hand reaching in around the essence of what remains of them, the bond, the tie, the bundled up ravaged complicated knot fate and love and hurt binding them. Curls her fingers around it, and pulls.

 

_I wasn't then, and I'm not yours to keep now._

 

The ties snap. He gasps, collapsing to the floor. But its the bond she takes, and everything left of her---because all of her belongs to her, even every bit that she gave him she will take back now---especially if he means to shackle her to him with it. She had thought it a kindness before, to leave something behind. But she cannot continue to do for him, even now.

 

His heart clenches around the sudden palpable absence. Wrenched away, every glimpse glimmer and chill she possessed. Now remains an unrelenting ache. A loud, gonging awareness of things irrevocably lost.

 

_I've, been, alone, all along._

_When you cried I'd, wipe away all of your tears._

 

She exhales with relief as she stretches her arms wide.

 

_When you screamed, I'd, fight away all of your fears._

 

She hears him howling his grief below. She squeezes her eyes shut, turning her face to the sun. Raises up on her toes.

 

_And I held your hand for all of these years._

 

**_Goodbye Crane._ **

 

And takes flight.

 

Downstairs he shivers. He cannot warm. His mind scatters and his heart beats erratically. Everything about his being, his entire internal equilibrium is out of balance.

 

He is hollow, inside. All of his wit and banter and vitality, gone. For when she took the bond, reclaimed herself, he went with her.

 

She was everything, every part of him. And now she has him, entirely, the way she never had him in life.

 

_But you still, have._

 

He is a shell.

 

_All,_

 

_of me._

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Did you think this was over? 
> 
> dead is never well and truly, dead.

He died, two weeks later.

 

Not of illness or broken bleeding things.

 

But from within, crumbling and weathering away, to a fine dust. Day by day, bits of him deteriorating. His fingers went, first.

 

Then toes.

 

Trailing sand behind him wherever he went. His beard, to a puff of ash. All the bristled fibres, like a shedding dog at the dining table.

 

His hair, lifting from his scalp like wisps of smoke, weaving tendrils swirling about his head when he turned after a sound, searching, hopeful, listening, feeling, for her, always her.

 

His lungs went with a gasp one night, an exhale that made them burst and explode as he coughed up specks, grey and white specks, hacking and choking as he did so.

 

This last erratic effort, this last onslaught of his decay is what will take him.

 

For every shudder and wrack of his body with this coughing fit, part of him disintegrates and whisks away, blowing great chunks in himself as if shooting through paper. Until he was nothing.

 

It would have been his heart to go next.

 

Were there still one there to rot.

* * *

 

She dances across ether, twirling and revelling in the sad freedom of no longer being caged in by a corporeal, delicate body. She is a strong wind, a gust. Malevolent, and benevolent, however she chooses to grow. She feels, when he dies.

Part of the bond that she had taken from him---indeed a complicated woven knot---unravels suddenly.

She wonders why her part remains, if he is dead forever, for good now.

Which poor fools now will take up the torch in their stead.

And just as she thinks it, a vortex grabs hold of her, greedily sucking her down, back down, and she goes, screaming and clawing in fear----

of returning to earth.

* * *

 

A happy, weary eyed mother gazes down at her. This is not the mother she knew, but someone else. A happily married woman. She will be her first and last child. She will call her, again, Abbie. She will live.

* * *

 

Halloween night, when she is sixteen, her friends will dare her to go into the abandoned house down the lane. The one rumoured that both occupants had died suddenly one summer, over a decade ago.

Chin held high and hand grasped in those of a boy she could one day love, she treads into this dark forgotten place. Squealing at creaking floorboards and clutching to him.

She is ordinary, this time. A little delicate.A little flirtatious, as she seizes his arm, mock begging him, "Come on, Lee, let's go, please?"

"You're safe with me," he promises, before a howl wails through the halls. Before grains of sand begin to rain down through the ceiling and a floor board gives way. He narrowly dodges it, but a crude rusty nail drags across his skin as it crashes past. And it will scar.

"Lee?"

"I'm fine Abbie. You okay?" she nods hurriedly yes, feeling off kilter. She'd felt something ghost past her skin, a shiver down her spine a second before. When she had swatted at the imaginary nuisance, had heard a disgruntled mutter in turn. 

"Let's go Lee." she begs in earnest now. She doesn't know why she thought accepting this stupid fright night thrill had appealed to her. She has no affinity for things that go bump in the night and she finds herself irrationally fearing that it will pay her back for pretending to be brave. Lee, with his penetrating gaze and strong jaw looks her over, assessing her level of fear, before slinging an arm around her, hugging her tight to his side as they amble from the house out onto the street. "I should've never let them suggest it. I'm sorry Abbie."

"It's alright Lee," she says, feeling less chilled, less spooked as they draw near to their group of friends, cheering triumphantly of their return.

They had ventured into the haunted house and come back out alive.

Although---she brushes absently where she thinks she feels specks of debris on her shoulder, and finds a thread. A tattered, worn, delicate thing. Long too. As she peels it away and their friends screech playfully that she's trailed cobwebs from the house. Remnants of a ghost. Laughing she pinches it away, letting it flutter in the night wind.

Beside her Lee hisses, only now feeling the sting of the injury from the wayward nail and he shrugs out of his jacket as they go, rolling up his sleeve and one of her girlfriends flinches away from the gush of blood for such a small cut. Abbie chastises her friend and promises him to find a bandage when they get back to the house.

Together they all march into the safety of their familiar homes, all across the street if not next door. Children, masquerading as goblins and witches and all manner of unpleasant and all forms of whimsy and imagination, dash to and fro collecting treats.

* * *

 

It was torn down, the wreckage of it. Creaky old terrible thing, levelled flat.

Because the owner liked the land, liked even the bones of the place but it was so rotted through, so dilapidated, so, dead. It would never be a place to call home. Not a place in which you build, found things upon.

Likea new life.

Because it was here, that Halloween Night so long ago that she had dabbed alcohol on his minor wound and he had teased her back about suddenly going chicken, and then she had kissed him.

Purely to shut him up, she would tell herself as the moment happened. It wouldn't be until after, just a millisecond after she registered that his lips were soft and his hand came up to cup her cheek, that she realized, understood, that she'd been wanting to do this.

He was her first kiss.

She was his.

They were, one another's, first, in everything.

Even when, tumultuous as teenagers may be, they had strayed and collided violently back together again, tearing away from the new arms back to each other, abandoning these new lips for the promise of the ones they'd known before---they'd managed to always hold their bond, in some fashion, higher above than any of their fleeting occasional romances. They never did anything new, with these people. Never went any further than they had gone with the other.

It seemed a vexing agreement that they both understood it to feel likebetrayal. So the first summer back home having finished their university courses, they stop fighting altogether and admit to the terrifying closeness.

Gives in amid sighs and moving bodies.

Gives in to bended knee by the river in the spring.

Gives in to Lee Richards, a man who remembers this house, its site, as the beginning of all.

And so thinks they should build their marital home on it.

* * *

In the disturbed air hover motes of dust and old dead fibres, tatters of soul. In the earth, compacted tight in the soil, wisps of curling smoke, like locks of a neatly trimmed head.

Wait.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Comments please! I'm doing super weird new things here and I'd love feedback!

Her sister knew her, one day, passing with a gaggle of youth--she had known it was the sibling she'd lost, living a second chance. Over a decade passed since then, and she considered being angry, being hateful towards this carefree sprite---here she was again living a life that had been denied her.

But only because she'd so willingly and freely given of her previous one to begin with.

So this is her reward, Jenny nods, mouth twisting as the group chatter and laugh ahead of her on the sidewalk. It's not until they've all broken off to their homes and the girl turns around towards her with the same almond brown eyes and open face does she realize she's inadvertently followed her home.

"Can I help you?" she asks.

"Nah. I…head in the clouds, guess I just got lost." Jenny battles back tears. To be this close and yet so far. " You know you remind me of someone. A lot." she blurts, and then can't seem to help herself. "My sister." she blinks. "When she was your age."

The youth peers at her thoughtfully. She dares to dream it might be a vague sort of recognition. " Her name?"

"Abbie," she rasps, a tear runs down her cheek and she hurriedly wipes it away, averting her gaze, already performing a slow pivot back in the opposite direction.

"That's my name too," the girl answers.

"I know." Jenny calls over her shoulder as she goes, picking up her pace. "I know."

* * *

Another ten years, perhaps more, later.

Talk of the town is that Abigail Carver---the surname of the new family she had been born to---renown Illusionist and Lee Richards, dare devil, are getting married.

Finally. Their respective death defying and enchanting careers at last allow them a reprieve to begin a life together. So she leaves the stage. He leaves his rings of fire. They return home and wed in a spectacular mesmerizing way.

Illusionists and daredevils make all sorts of friends on the road. Pyrotechniques and two mediums. Some very curious types with a fascination in the world beyond. Acrobat acts. Musicians. A contortionist had walked down the aisle on one hand and foot in her bridesmaid dress to the delight, amusement and horror of their guests.

Abbie and Lee love and adore their broad and strange array of friends. They've always been ravenous, curious people, the pair of them. Freedom seeking and agency declaring---a strong part of what had been so vexing about their stubborn draw to the other, before they succumbed to it.

They loved to chase. Knowledge, adventure. Between the pair of them lies four degrees. Her Law and Music, and an impressive amount of skill in hand to hand combat. Himself, English and History, and an impressive cook.They read like fiends, and laugh in equal measure.

They are the enchanted couple of Sleepy Hollow. The beautiful glowing pair with the odd careers and bright minds.

More than one citizen will tell you of the times they have caught the pair together, whether indecently or no---ravenous people in more ways than one---and had felt unmistakably like an intruder. The intensity of what they feel for one another is a palpable tangible force that can wall out all distractions if they will it.

They are always by each others side--even when their professions divided them---their level of communication bordered on being smothering.

Together, they fear nothing, have nothing to fear.

So they think absolutely nothing of starting fresh on the ruin of this old house.

The land calls to them in that way they cannot explain. So they do not fight it.

* * *

Fifty five years old and still sharp and deadly as a rusty blade, Jenny Mills keeps her trailer by the lake. There's a man there on occasion now. Sturdy trunk of a thing that makes her forget she lost everything and has nothing left with his calloused fingers and a soft mouth.

And a bottle.

Her students---she heads an archeology program, she'd had little choice with her life interrupted the way it had been and with her peculiar life experience---call her surly and disgruntled, and disconcertingly attractive in all of her hardness. She's still lithe, and the wrinkles that creep along her eyes twinkle with a world weariness greater still than even her years. Grey strands weave in among her hair now and she lets them. Other women might fuss themselves with wrinkle creams and serums and what have you, desperately trying to stave off the ravages of time but not Jenny Mills.

She lets the age come upon her like the gift that was denied the people she lost. Wears it like a proud badge to honour them. Her best years, she owes to them.

Joe's spirit went peaceably and Abbie's---well she'd seen the fruit of Abbie's sacrifice in her return as this young woman who the town talked about, singular and one of a kind Abbie Carver, who could make things disappear and cross rooms in blinks of an eye, lift objects, guess cards, and pulls threaded needles through her hand and levitate, to name a few. She wondered when she'd first caughtAbbie's showif this gift she possesses could indeed be some left over power from their ancestor Grace---if possibly some of that old life had filtered into her new one, but hot on the heels of that thought was the insane impulse to approach her afterwards and to say "I'm your sister." she'd quashed that thoroughly. People already think Jenny is a bit fearsome and strange. Insanity won't do to add to the mix.

But she knows Abbie's spirit is well, living a colourful, fascinating life.

But Crane, whom she had watched becoming dust and ash for a fortnight before he took himself, quite unintentionally, she thinks, to oblivion, she had always felt as if she were being watched when she crossed the house on a walk. And she would glance up to see the curtain falling back in place.

When she first saw Lee Richards, she'd thought she'd seen a ghost, of sorts. The same height, hair a little darker and longer, with waves that could inspire envy and skin more of an olive in tone---and admittedly, some features that were his and his alone he's a broader shouldered man, more muscular, but the composite of him, how he held himself was handsome, striking, commanding and eerily familiar. Only because he did not seem so inclined to condescend and his eyes more a hazel green---brown in the winter---she'd heard women fawn, was she vaguely convinced it wasn't him, come back.

And then they were married and the house torn down and construction underway.

Well.

Jenny Mills had had no reason to believe, whether Lee had any part of Crane's spirit or not, that something, someone, might still linger there.

That there might be something unfinished.

* * *

The house is finished end of September. Abbie and Lee, fresh off their honey moon had left the property in capable steady hands while they'd been away, return now, to settle in. As they walk in, both heave a sigh of relief. It feels new, and familiar at once, like home.

The hardwood floors gleam and the rooms reek of the smell of fresh paint. More or less, the house has been restored to a T, althoughthe walls were done a shade lighter, making it more airy and welcoming, the windows redone, and bigger, let sunshine pour in. They venture from room to room, cataloguing in their heads what will go where. There, will be their dining room, "We can play chess there some nights" she says, curling into his arm and he pecks her crown.

"The study can go here,"

"I love this breakfast bar."

"We'll need some plants,"

"Succulents?"

They'd both glanced at one another and then laughed.

"Your bikes in the garage"

"And your wands and boxes there too," he ribs back, hugging her tight.

Upstairs they plan where the bed will go, the dresser, day dream coloursfor new bedding. They both have the notion that they want it to look somewhat victorian. Brocade and dark reds, a canopy.

There's two spare rooms, a new addition from the previous version of the house. The nearest one, "That'll be the nursery" Lee rumbles warmly in her ear and her face heats. Yes, Abbie wants to be mother, and even knowing she herself had an incredible childhood, she's still a little fearful of being a parent. How consuming it is. She's tried to tell Lee she thinks there's something she needs to do before they think of starting a family. And he always asks her, warm concerned eyes, what?

And it is the only matter in which Abbie will always answer she doesn't know, and Lee cannot understand it.

Directly across from this room is what had been the old guest. The room is painted dark green, the flooring in here, still suspiciously dark and the air misty, as if cast in shadow, and is ice cold as they approach the threshold.

It knocks the air from their lungs.

"There's a heating issue in here," Lee observes with a chuckle. "Brrr! come on Abbie, Abbie?"

The room is cold, dim and stagnant in a full way. A stillness too still. Pregnant with a nothingness that feels distinctly, alive.It prickles her skin. She stands before this room transfixed, head cocked to the side, dust motes dance in the misty air and she imagines that she sees a veil, delicately tear, right down the middle. And as it does so, a corner flutters, and behind, beneath, she glimpses what looks like a modest bed, and the back of someones heel standing just out of view. The board creaks as she steps in and the shoes turn.

"Abbie?"

Blinking, the split veil disappears, and she is gazing on once more an empty, inexplicably freezing room. "Come on hon you'll catch a draft in there," Lee tugs gently on her arm, guiding her away but then something stringy catches across her face and she swipes at it hurriedly.

"You alright?"

"Spider web," she answers, ignoring the fact that a newly redone home shouldn't have spiders. Lee lets her go, reluctantly, reaching in his back pocket for the phone to call about the heating issue. As he disappears down the steps, Abbie looks back on this oddly freezing room in her new home. Contemplates the weathered oldness of it. Even though it was reconstructed with the rest of the house, it feels separate. Something left behind.

When she glances down at her fingertips, it is not the silk of a web.

But a thread.


	4. Chapter 4

That feeling again.

She can't help but walk past it, it's on her route to work. On her way home. Brand spanking new and looking damningly like the house it was before, Jenny senses she's being watched. When she looks up, she finds she's right. But not by a spectre, real or imaginary, in a window, but by the woman in the doorway, leaning on the frame in her jogging clothes, fashionable spandex,and holding a mug of coffee. She raises her mug to her. "Good morning" she calls.

Jenny's heart falters. "Morning," she slows down and turns to face the person as they skip down the steps towards her.

"Abbie" Jenny greets.

She falters. "Yes….how did you…."

Jenny chews her lip. "Years, years ago, I….I got lost, remember? I told you, you reminded me of my sister."

Her face lights up with recognition. "oh! Yes, I do remember now. How is she?"

"She died."

"Oh."

"Before I'd ever even met you." Jenny finishes. "It's insane how much two people can, hah," she chokes up, glances quickly away. "Look alike. You still look like her." she adds.

"Maybe we're secretly related," Abbie tries to joke. Jenny inhales quickly and begins to choke, launching herself into a coughing fit. "You alright? Wait, come, come in," she grasps the older woman's hand and drags her up the steps into the house and the sight of it on the inside shocks Jenny and her body alike into silence. Abbie abandons her at the door, bounding into the kitchen---the same kitchen almost, just newer appliances---to get her a glass of water. "We just finished the place," she says as she rushes back, pushing the glass in Jenny's hands.

Jenny drains it, gasps and swipes a hand across the back of her mouth. "It…looks good. Like it never got old and decrepit and dilapidated to begin with. LIke it use to look before."

She feels Abbie's gaze snap to her. "You've been here before?"

Jenny cuts her eye at her, working her mouth. Calculating how much she can say. "Knew the owner before you, is all." she sighs, casting her gaze around. She lets her feet carry her down the hall, peering into the dining room where the memory of Brunch settles down, transporting her back in time. Joe and Abbie arguing about who stole food out of the others plate. Crane rising, clearing his and her plate, looking fondly on her sister as she passed. She can remember her younger self scooting out to join him, following him to the kitchen, gently teasing him about the way he looks at Abbie. The memory fades and she turns back on the woman who has followed her, watched her quiet observation. "Made a lot of memories here."

"You were, close, with who lived here?"

"It was my sisters house."

Abbie blinks, "I'm….I'm sorry I didn't get your name."

"Jennifer Mills," she answers, letting the tears come. "And hers was Abbie Mills. and this was her house. And now you live in it."

"Small world," Abbie murmurs, awestruck and feeling a little strange.

Jenny locks eyes with her. Staring her down, almost through her. "Something like that." she says finally. "Something, like that."

* * *

 

"I see you," Lee taunts from where he stands before the mirror, buttoning his shirt. in the reflection, nestled and half buried among red bedding is his wife, sleep tossed and wide awake, face glowing from a good nights sleep and having been passionately, energetically, woken up.

She'd drifted back to sleep for a brief spell while he'd gone to the shower but her eyes cracked open when he reentered. Abbie can't describe why but she likes watching Lee dress.

He's a very deliberate, put together man. Sleek in his tastes but home spun and earthy when he wants to be. She watches him buttoning cuffs and smoothing back his hair before he ties it up, the way he twiddles his fingers between two bottles of cologne before choosing the one to the left. He always chooses that one. She buys it for him. The one to the right came from his mother. That only ever got sprayed on for special occasions. She passed several years ago. Abbie thinks he keeps it for memories.He smirks in the mirror, catching her eye and clears his throat.

"You know, I'd call you a voyeur if you weren't my wife,"

"And that would be true if you weren'tstanding willfully in my line of sight." she retorts, smiling around a yawn.

Lee turns, the corner of his mouth turned up. "Dear me," he says, putting on an accent that can't possibly be native anywhere, "Is the lady finding it difficult to contain herself?" his eyes twinkle at her and her skin heats.

"I find it hard to contain anything where you're concerned Lee," she looks away, down at the sheets, pinching them between her fingers. "You know that." she says it a little defeatedly, a small shame of sorts that anyone could hold such a thrall over her. It still embarrasses her, sometimes, how deeply her feelings run, and how suddenly they came on, even back when they were teens. How they rage still, stronger every day.

She feels the mattress sink with the weight of him plunking down on the edge, and cupping her chin tilts her head upwards toward his.

"It's the same for me you know Abbie," he says searching her face. "It's always the same for me,"

They made up their mind, long ago to embrace the closeness and have been richer and happier for it.

But there are still days in which it terrifies them. When it seems altogether, bigger, greater, than they can contain. It's a reckless powerful thing brewing within them, and they know, that if the other were to entreat them to a dangerous deed, they would blindly concede to it. It shouldn't be natural, something this strong.

Something that feels this volatile and at times all consuming. More than once they have wondered if they've lost themselves in the other.

She gazes into his eyes until he begins to draw away before she lunges forward, flinging her arms around his neck, pressing her lips to his.

Yet terrifying or no, they cannot fight it.

Nothing could ever come between.

Unless, by some chance, there was another out there, just as equal a match. A first.An ancient, forgotten, rejuvenated thing, that senses an arrival, and has returned.

* * *

Lee has interviews today about taking time off, and he'll be tied up most of the day. So it's just Abbie, still unpacking, here and there. The guest room now has a shelf, and a bed, one that reminds her eerily of what she imagines she saw there that first day.

* * *

 

She was, truly, entirely ordinary until that Halloween night so long ago. The next day she was suddenly very intrigued by magic, deceiving the human eye. The next day, Lee's momentary brush with danger seemed to have sparked in him a hunger to cheat death and injury.

A trigger then. and after so long they have returned to it, this house.

A catalyst.

* * *

"Hi, come in,"

Ever since Jenny had confided to her that she had a connection with the house, not to mention sharing a name with the sister the woman had lost, Abbie felt a connection, a sort of duty even, to welcome her into her home. To let Jenny relieve and connect with memories here. And even, out of her own curiosity, to learn more about the history of what this house was like before.

After all, Abbie, has questions.

Everyone knew, back when she was a child, that the house had gone untouched, uninhabited for years, falling into decay and rot and victim to rumours of haunting and restlessness. Everyone knew, that those who had lived in the house before, had died.

The woman first, they'd said, with shady explanations. She'd been in law enforcement of some high degree. A mission, then, that had gone wrong. And there had been a man, too. The trail went definitively cold there. No records. No history. His existence sometimes seemed questionable.

Abbie won't pretend, that beside the odd sentimental value she and Lee felt toward the property, that there hadn't been a needling inquisitiveness, that entertained, very lightly, that there was something a little mysterious and unspoken, perhaps even enchanted about it.

And so many things about her relationship with Lee, it's sudden, rapid, deep and enduring intensity after all these years, crosses them both as a sort of miraculous mystery.

So really, her inviting Jenny Mills over is not a wholly selfless act.

She watches the way the woman gets a faraway look in her eyes when she casts her gaze about the rooms. The way the wrinkles seem to fade and her voice turns young and wicked and sharp as she tells her stories of the mischievous things she and her sister got up to. About her first and only true love.

"Loved him with all….everything I had in me." she admits, tearfully one afternoon. "I didn't have much, but what I had I gave." she gasps as she swipes away a tear and Abbie offers her a tissue, and then grips her hand. Jenny inhales and holds it for a long time, and then looks at her sorrowfully, gaze penetrating and deep. "Thanks, Abbie, for, listening." she opens her mouth to continue, hesitant, before seeming to change her mind, opting for something else instead "Haven't had someone listen ina long while."

Abbie's eyes crinkle. "What're friends for?"

Jenny's face crumbles and she begins to cry.

At that moment Lee comes in the door.

* * *

"Remind me how you met her again?" he asks that evening, getting ready for bed.

"When I first met her?"

"Oh, right, when she followed you home."

"Lee," she admonishes.

"And now she turns up at our house. Regularly. Just to, reminisce." he says it off handedly but she knows the suspicion and wariness creeping into his tone. "It's strange, Abbie."

"It's only been a week."

"And she just comes here to tell you her life story."

"She doesn't have any family to talk to."

Lee turns around and studies his wife. "That's it, Abbie. Haven't you noticed? She looks at you, like you're family."

* * *

"How did Joe die?" Abbie asks the next day.

It's odd not being on the road anymore, even though she and Lee agreed to take time off after they got married, start a family, the amount of restlessnessshe feels without having rehearsals and without dreaming up new tricks, or the antics of Lee asking her to light something on fire while he tries to wriggle himself out of a strait jacket---she didn't account for. She hasn't found another, less, animated job to fill her days with. Although there's been one or two people poking around to write a biography. She declined adamantly before, saying she hadn't lived enough to write a book. But with the creeping boredom and abrupt loneliness---Lee adapted quickly back into a sensible job, a history teacher is on leave at the high school and he's subbing in---she finds herself wondering if she shouldn't change her mind. In spite of Lee's wariness of Jenny, her visits fill the days, the hours at least, until Lee gets home. And it's still early, only the second week of october and Abbie just hasn't been able to wrap her mind around something textbook definition of normal yet.

She will eventually. Settle down enough in her mind to busy herself with a part time job like Lee in music, or something.

Just not yet.

Jenny lowers the mug and tucks a grey strand behind her ear. The creases around her mouth deepen with the pain of memory. By my hand, she thinks solemnly. There was nothing to be done for it at the end of the day but she's certain she won't paint herself in a kind light telling her sister incarnate she shot Joe herself. That's the most frustrating thing about all of this, really.

It's seems like a back handed slap from the universe, a kick in the teeth. For how long has Jenny wanted her sister back? And now she has her, but the sibling returned to her doesn't recognize or remember anything of who they were. No, to Abbie, Jenny is a bitter middle aged woman with wicked humour and heavy memories, perhaps bordering on a little unhinged, visiting the old home of her deceased sister.

To Abbie, Jenny is an eccentric. A woman in town. A strange older friend. The veiled distance of it hurts. For even behind this guise of newness, of 'unfamiliarity' there is a connection she feels to the new Abbie. Her sister, somewhere, is still in there. But whether or not those memories could ever surface she doesn't know.

"Hunting accident." she answers at last.

Abbie watches her, eyes assessing before she says, "Oh."

"Wolf, got on him." she carries on, elaborating. "They were struggling bad, and, shots were fired, at the beast and…..Joe got one too. It was vital."

Suddenly guilty Abbie turns away. "I'm sorry, that, that was none of my business Jenny."

Yeah it was. she thinks. After all these years, she's not sure she ever got the chance to tell Abbie anything remotely close to how Joe had really died. And this isn't the truth of it either.

But it's as close as she can afford to get.

* * *

It starts that night. Creaking floorboards, groaning shelves. The shuffle clunk of a book being lifted, rifled through, and restored to its place.

In the bed beside her, Lee slumbers on.

She shuts her eyes tight. Thinks of sheep, thinks of morning. Thinks of----the chilly guest room. There had been nothing to cure it. There weren't any heating issues that the expert could discern. Nothing Lee could find.

The room's just an ice box. An impermeable fog of cold. And a little noisy, too, it seems wont to creak and wheeze, they've just about chocked it up to a peculiarity of the house, but tonight is the first night those noises sound more….real. Concrete. Like movements. Like a person.

Abbie hasn't lingered in the room since putting the furniture in, turning her gaze sharply away from the corner that flutters in the wind, threatening to show her something lurking behind the refurbished facade. Fearful that her mind has suddenly thought it prudent to begin playing tricks on her here.

Another creak. Flipping pages.

Chancing a glance at Lee, still peaceful in sleep, Abbie swings out of the bed, pulling on socks as stealthily and quiet as able, begins to edge toward the door.

Out in the hall the air is still, dark night. Like a house should be during resting hours. She shuffles toward the guest, the door they always leave wide open, and peers into it's dark, stagnant depths.

But there.

A seam, along the far wall where it meets the flooring, a light. The sort you see beneath a closed door. In the corner of her eye she sees the veil give a little shake and she squeezes her eyes shut, determined to shut it out, but it peels away still and the light in the room grows, spreading, spilling across the floor, and as it does so, like paper, the edges curl and fall away and there is----

A long dark coat and a high collar,

A shock of golden brown hair,

A tall male figure turning now toward the opening, her heart beats erratically, frantic with fright, excitement, strange hope, and---

"Abbie?"

She gasps and turns to find Lee watching her in the hall curiously. "Abbie?"

"I….I heard a noise, Lee." She says, chafing her arms and turning her back on the room that instantly has fallen back into place as it was before.

Lee furrows his brow. "Come to bed hon." 

She musters a smile for him, levels no protest and goes to him, into his arms, and lets him guide her back into their bedroom. As she goes she rubs a foot against another, feeling something stuck to her foot, caught around her ankle.

A thread.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anyone wanna hazard a guess what's going on here?

"Tell me about her."

"Who?" Jenny asks.

They're not at the house today. Too unsettled by the events of the previous night, Abbie suggested they go for a run. It was good. Companionable running, side by side. Nature, crisp air. Silence. Just breathing, just feet pounding on the earth. They've slowed to a walk now though, as they veer back towards the neighbourhood, already decided they'll stop for a quick cup of coffee.

"Your sister. Abbie?" the woman huffs with a smile. "The one I remind you so strongly of."

"There's not much more to tell." Jenny says, wiping sweat from her brow. "She was a strong woman. She always did what was right."

"No, I….I mean about the house, Jenny. I mean," Abbie breaks off. "Why'd it go abandoned so long. Didn't she leave it to you?"

"You know some people might call your curiosity morbid."

"I heard stories growing up, that's all. People used to say that it was a couple who lived there." Abbie stops to stretch, turning her face up to the sun. Squinting into it. " We used to try to dig up information when we were younger." she shrugs. "Guess I just want the mystery solved."

Jenny swings around abruptly, grasping her shoulders, eyes steely and momentarily unkind.

"You leave it alone. You hear me?"

"But---"

"You can't live in your past" She snaps.

* * *

Later, as she parts ways with Jenny Mills at starbucks, she'll remember that Jenny had said ' _Your past'_

* * *

"A field trip" Abbie repeats, mouth quirked in amusement. "This early?"

"A week in washington." Lee explains, feeling a little unsure of the prospect himself. Along with two other teachers, easily sixty teenagers between them. He's unsure he can survive that much exuberant youth.

"Well you did sign the contract," she laughs, observing his stricken face. "Guess you're going babe."

"You sure you don't want to come?"

"What?"

"Another chaperone?"

Abbie is getting a kick out of watching Lee squirm thinking about this trip. And you know what, he's so keen on starting a brood of his own, a crash course in minding minors should give him perspective. "No hon I'm good."

"Please?" he begs.

She stifles a snicker. "You afraid of these kids?"

"It's a lot of them. For seven whole days."

"You'll survive."

"I might not."

"But you will."

"And what makes you so sure?"

"Because I know not even death itself could keep you from coming back home to me. No matter if those kids drive you to the brink of insanity Lee, I know you'll come back." she teases, sitting up in the bed and reaching for his collar.

He leans in to kiss her, mouth warm and soft against hers. After a moment he draws back, resting his forehead against hers. "I hate when you're right"

she beams at him. "You must feel hate often," and then, "Do you mind if Jenny stayed a day or two, while you're gone?"

She waits for him to argue with her. To be wary and cautious.

"Yeah." he says at last. "Yeah sure, she's your friend, yeah she can keep you company a bit Abbie. It's a good idea."

* * *

 

Too close.

She thinks as she packs her bag. Jenny is certain she's getting too close. What can be the harm either way, she's not sure.

But for all of Abbie's sacrifice previously, having a second go at life is supposed to be her reward, the universe giving her a gift, a present. Another chance at a happy normal life without her developing this eerie bond. Without wondering after dead histories and others lives.

That's why she lost her in the first place.

Then too, Abbie had been too concerned about other lives. Having answers, wanting answers. Being involved, trying to help, trying to do right. Don't ask Jenny what ill she dreams could come of this---in spite of her own burgeoning sisterly feelings Abbie has not demonstrated reciprocity of any kind---but perhaps it's best she apply some distance first, before things get weird. Before anything about their friendship forces Jenny's hand to reveal something harmful.

What were too happen, she wonders, if she told Abbie the truth?

Well, she reasons, there's a very good, strong chance she'd find herself committed. After all, that's how things had gone the first time her sister had been confronted with something abnormal. Jenny pauses in her rapid haste and flops down on the bed, panting---she hadn't even known she was exerting herself---and coughs and splutters as tears gather in her eyes.

Or perhaps that's the thing, really.

Jenny cannot bare for history to repeat itself in that way. For her to reach out, to bridge an impossible, unbelievable, terrifying gap---and only for Abbie to turn away from her, again. That initial rift still stings. Even though Abbie had done everything, everything,

everything to correct it.

The Tree.

The Box.

The Grave that harbours nothing but an illusion. A front. Keeping up appearances for those who don't know her, will never know, who she was, truly, deep down, inside out, what she was made for.

She had felt relief, at first, when this friendship began to bloom. A half done peace, to talk to her again, see her face, hear her laughter. But with it still comes the hedge, the line she cannot cross. Many times she has wanted to reach out and embrace her and never let her go. The closeness feels strong and deep for such a short span---and only because Jenny knows what Abbie doesn't.

Shaking her head, Jenny wrestles with herself, choking back the sudden onslaught of sobs.

She cannot be a reason that drives Abbie back down that self sacrificing path. Not again. She can't.

* * *

"Going out of town for a bit. Before it gets too cold." she announces when Abbie turns up unexpectedly outside the trailer. Abbie blinks at her, narrows her eyes. "Where to?"

Her tone turns frosty as she replies, knowing it'll hurt her, at least a little. Enough maybe for the fast fondness to begin to wane while she's gone. "Away,"

"Away?"Abbie cocks her head to the side. "Just, away? I was asking if you'd like to stay over a night or two while Lee's gone."

Jenny pauses. "Why's Lee leaving?"

"School trip, I figured I wouldn't be alone in the house."

"You're afraid of being alone?"

"I didn't say that."

"That's exactly what you just said."

"I thought you'd appreciate it since it holds so many memories for you"

"And none for you?" Jenny fires back.

The veiled truth hangs in mid air between them. Abbie backs away a step.

No. Jenny thinks. She's slipped up again. She's gone too far.

"What do you mean." Abbie says at last, still backing away. "You said something like that the other day, Jenny what do you mean by it Jenny,what aren't you tell me"

"I'm going away." She says, voice tight, not meeting Abbie's gaze. "You can help me pack or you can go. But we're changing the subject."

"I have a right to know---"

Jenny ticks her head toward the path Abbie walked to get to the trailer. A clear invitation to leave if she opts to press the issue.

Temper boiling with her conflicted hurt, Abbie considers it. Turning her back on this woman and storming away and leaving everything this peculiar friendship had to offer behind. Moving on with her life. Forget Jenny Mills and her wildness and hard edges and eyes that sometimes gaze off into the distance of memory.

You've done it before echoes in her mind and she whirls around ready to retort, but Jenny is standing still, staring at a book in hand.

Grace's Journal. One of the few keepsakes she'd taken from the house after. One of few things Crane hadn't noticed her sneaking out of the house when he began aggressively hoarding all of Abbie's old belongings. She used to flip through the pages cover to cover, looking for answers, spells, ways to bring her back but the pages were blank to her.

It had been a gift to Abbie, after all. Chosen.

Maybe, had there been time, whatever heritage they possessed would have kindled and Jenny would be able to read it too---but with Abbie died any affinity she may have had for magic. She strokes the cover and leafs through the pages, looking up only when the crunch of leaves tells her Abbie hasn't left. She watches her sister reborn draw near and holds her breath as she regards the book in Jenny's hands. Watches her hand reach to touch it.

"I don't understand."Abbie reigns herself in, running a hand through her hair. "Did I do something, say something to upset you?"

Be cruel. Jenny's mind insists. Sever this tie.

But it's her sister. Whether she will ever know that or not----this is a blessing to be reunited, even in this unconventional, unfair way. She shouldn't fly in the face of the Almighty by damning it.

"My head starts getting funny if I stay still too long. Roamed too much in my youth." she cracks a weak smile. "Old habits, you know."

"You're not just skipping town?"

"I don't have anyone to run from. I'm coming back, just catching some air before we start getting proper snow.Leaving the trailer here even."

"Where are you going," She persists, and for a moment, for the first time, Jenny feels well and truly like their roles have been reversed. She is the older sibling, going places the younger cannot follow.

"Don't know yet----don't start, that's my way. Always has been. I do what I want. Go where I want. Too old to change that now."and hell if she knows why she does what she does next---maybe because she sees a hint of pain in Abbie's eyes. A chance that the other woman feels the connection she does, but has no words or explanations for it. The confusion of it swirls on her face and she masks it poorly.

The old Abbie, the tough outside soft inside Abbie Mills---knew all about maintaining composure, hiding away and walling off. Compartmentalizing and tidying away troublesome things. But this one, she's never had a nightmare plague her sleep or stalk her waking hours. Nothing of demons and foster care and hardship---she has had no reason to learn to school her face into expressions of neutrality. No reason to learn to hide her thoughts and feelings.

No reason to want to. 

It breaks her heart, seeing this ungoverned vulnerability on her. This glimmer of threatened peace.

But she sees it, all the same, and knows Abbie is struggling to make sense of it, and so she offers her the book. For a moment Abbie stares at the old thing in her hands, first with wonder then becoming perplexed. "Why are you giving me this?"

Jenny chews her lip. "It belonged to our ancestor."

Abbie's eyes snap to hers.

"Mine and my sister." Jenny amends, inwardly groaning that it amounts to the same thing.

"That doesn't answer my question."

"For once can you just take a gift?" she snaps. "Just…keep it till I get back."

"Jenny I can't take this. It's….ancient. What if I wreck it?" she tries to give it back but Jenny pushes it back in her hands.

"For that reason. I want you to keep it. This trailers been broken into over the years. I don't want it going missing."

"You think a thief is gonna bother with this raggedy book?"

"Please stop arguing with me."

At last she wraps her arms around the book, holding it securely to her chest. Stomping down on excitement that flits through her. As if she's laying eyes on an old friend. As if the book has suddenly become precious to her, too.

"Alright." Abbie nods.

Jenny nod back, offering the faintest smile. "Alright."

* * *

 

"I don't want to go"

"What?" Abbie asks. She's only just gotten in the door. Kicked off her shoes, journal still in hand when Lee goes straight for her, hands on her arms, grasping, lifting and puling her to him, crushing his lips against hers. The book crashes to the floor.

"I don't want to do it Abbie, leave you here. I can't" his kisses become more frantic, frenzied. He pins her against the wall.

"Lee" she rasps. "Lee what---" his fingers work at the button on her jeans, half holding her up with the other arm. "You're not making any sense, Lee--" fly undone, zipper down his fingers dip inside around fabric and she hisses. A hand twines in his hair.

"I can't leave you Abbie. Don't make me, please." he begs against her lips, his fingers performing sinful magic and she throws her head back, succumbing to him and moans.

"What---what's---wrong---" she tries and fails to conduct a conversation while her mental faculties are being pulled taut by his touch.

"Leaving you" he insists, his voice heated as he withdraws his hand, dropping her suddenly, an arm hooked around her waist redirects them to the floor. The wood is hard and cold on her back but then he's tugging off her pants, her underwear. "Leaving you here is wrong." he seems possessed. Single minded in his raving, single minded in his administrations as he parts her legs and lowers his head.

"Lee" is all she can say for moments after that. At the top of her lungs, in a growl at the back of her throat. A whisper, as he makes love to her, deep and slow. In the hall way on the first floor. Her head is spinning. She is several ways from tuesday with his energy and relentless coaxing her to blissful oblivion, and now here, surrounded again by his fevered muttering, even amid kisses and strokes and so much tenderness and love in his actions. "I can't lose you. I won't." he promises, vows, over and over. "I love you. I love you Abbie. Don't leave me."

An assurance is on the tip of her tongue, it really is. But the cry of release is what comes out instead. "Lee" she says finally, holding him still, close, safe, still joined. "Lee" there are other words she wants here. She knows other words, questions muddle and curdle in her mind, but his name is all that escapes her at present. Her eyes flutter closed.

"Abbie," he answers. And then.

_Leftenant._

Her eyes snap open.


	6. Chapter 6

The sweat growing cool on her skin. The floors beginning to wreak havoc on her back, his body pressed close, lips grazing against her neck She turns her head, fingers massaging through his beautiful hair. "what did you just say?" she asks. His head turns slowly in her direction. He blinks rapidly, as if coming out of a haze, waking from a trance.

"Abbie?"

"Yes," she starts slowly.

"When did you get here----" he looks down at their entangled bodies and hurriedly discarded clothes, takes in the uncomfortable, rough hard place in which he had chosen to ignite passion.

She smirks at him. "That good huh? Gave you amnesia?"

The momentary disorientation clears from his eyes and he grins at her wickedly, eyes twinkling, he arches a brow. As if in challenge. Like a dare.

"The world is worth forgetting to be with you." he says warmly. She keeps tracing his face, the expression, it's charming, smarmy, and makes her feel warm all over again but another thought makes hercold inside.

It doesn't sit right on his face.

Something, somewhere, in there, isn't all Lee.

The words are his but not.

As if to further prove her point he gives himself a shake and begins to detach himself and rise, pulling her up with him."Babe?"

Abbie studies him, grasps his face in her hands. He reaches up to hold them in place. It's something they've always done. For whatever reason, this inventory of the other, soothes their souls on another plane. She peers into his eyes, searching, searching, looking for him, her husband, the man she loves. Who jokes and laughs and is incredibly learned and is a bright bubbling spirit.

He smiles at her, and there he is, Lee Richards, man of her heart, the smile curls all the way across his face, lighting him up like the sun has risen in it. Andher heart swells with relief. Perhaps she imagined it.

But then, and it's just a flicker, the gaze turns old.

Penetrating and deep, from far away.

Beckoning to her, calling.

Her breath hitches.

For a second, Lee's eyes had turned blue.

* * *

 

"Lee," she calls. He comes to stand beside her at the threshold. His arms go about her waist. "Were you in here today?" she asks.

He furrows his brow. He knows he was. He came in looking for a book, he thinks, butthen he tripped, collided with something--into it?-- he remembers vaguely a sharp sting of pain and---his gaze goes to the floor, where there are tiny dark spots. Drops of blood. This, all before he'd heard her come in downstairs. Self consciously, he finds himself lifting a hand up to the scar on his arm, pulls his finger tips away to discover the old healed over thing has reopened. But it's not the bloodied floor that's captured Abbie's attention. She motions faintly to the window sill where rests a plant. "Did you put that there?" she asks breathlessly.

Lee shakes his head no. It hadn't been there when he'd left the room, moments before Abbie had come home.

She feels cold and has the distinct impression she's being watched, scrutinized beneath a weighted gaze.

"A telegram then?" she laughs incredulously.

Lee takes her hand, warm, solid, in his and holds it tight. He searches for her. Searches and searches for the woman who is flight of fancy brave and all these other facets of extraordinary. The one who completes him, sees him, matches. Searches for the strength of them, their love, their bond, in her small, deft, beautiful, capable hands. She squeezes back, and his heart thumps comfortingly of sure things. But he looks at her face, and sees the wonder there, as she gazes at the empty room. At the plant on the sill.

He feels the slightest strain.

As if for a moment, she was bound to something, someone else.

They regard the plant on the sill and say nothing.

Neither of them are going to admit to placing the succulent there.

They do not lie to each other.

* * *

 

"Call me when you reach." Abbie says, fingers tight in his collar. He kisses her, once, twice, thrice, feeling increasing doubt with each one. He shouldn't leave. He knows he shouldn't leave.

Something is amiss.

There is a discord, a frayed end, forming between them and he can't grasp the ends tight enough. It is not that their love wanes.

But thatsomething, something else, in this house,

grows.

* * *

Nimble fingers and a gift for clearing her mind had never seemed very purposeful until she'd started pulling illusions and sleight of hand. Until Abbie started trying to 'will' things with only the power vested in her cranium to do as she wished. That talent decided to present itself as a form of amusement, to first her friends, and then, growing bold, wanting challenge, to audiences at coffee shops and on the street. Around the same time she was trying to make flames dance in the palms of her hands and Lee was begging her to light him up. His motorbike. See if he could make a jump while it was still on fire.

She'd doubted it. She'd tried many eerie, creepy things, but hadn't ever once considered, that it could be real, true, power.

She just supposed she was, like the greats, Harry Houdini and David Copperfield, yes, even modern day David Blaine and Chris Angel---just very attuned to her senses. A female. That also drew a crowd. A woman doing what she did was a sight to truly behold. It is not all woman who can willingly and unflinchingly pull a threaded needle through her hand. Not all who would lock themselves in a chest in a water tank and then appear unscathed among the audience, that could make sparks dance and release doves into the air with a snap of her fingers.And yes, light Lee's motorcycle on fire while he was still on it. Never lifting a finger.

Fanciful as she has been in her interests----it never occurred to Abbie before that any of that might be real, true, honest magic. Ancestral.

So the journal fascinates her as she flips through it, the first night alone in the house. The spells and stories of Grace Dixon. It tingles her fingers. She is rapt in her focus on the pages. Astounded that this woman could be part of Jenny's history. Suddenly, the pages stop, blank,with only the words "Yours to fill" left behind. And a woman's face flashes in her mind. But what frightens her most is the bolt of recognition that struck her. The surety that it was Grace's kind face that had flickered before her eyes. The bizarre, impossible feeling, that the book means, her.

Her skin is hot and her breath coming fast and Abbie suddenly feels charged, full of energy that has no place to go. Something within her yearns to break free and she cannot understand it. Little pieces of her span out into spiderwebs in her mind, connecting and weaving but she can't make sense.

This book is not just a strange family heirloom of her friend Jenny Mills.

Her talent is not just happenstance and a well trained mind,

there's something about Lee---

this house----

The steps creak.

Abbie freezes, book still in hand. Left too long with this journal and her mind, some part of her being feels unhinged, reaching, spanning, seeking out an unknown, forgotten thing---the steps creak again, receding, and slowly, she closes the journal, and rises to her feet.

Common sense and logic abandon here. An odd acceptance that these principles have never held sway in her life settles over her. Honestly, everything about her life has been unconventional, strong and wondrous in every way. Her gift, Lee's daring. Their bond. The lives they've lead. Their colourful interests. This house.

This. House.

With its mysteries. It's rumoured past. Heavy laden with memories and tied to her now, because it was the first night that she chose Lee. The night that made him fearless. Made her magic.

She follows the steps.

Slowly, up to the second floor.

To the guest room, with it's door closed.

It should unnerve her, because she knows it was open. They always leave it open.

The floor creaks and she reaches for the knob and twists.

She lets her mind free, discards the instinct that has barred her so far from unleashing it on this room. That has instilled in her trepidation on what she may find.

It is no secret to her now. She doesn't know what she will unearth here today but knows there is something to be found. It is singing in her bones. In her mind. Screaming in her soul.

The door whispers open. The veil already torn wide.

A shock of golden brown hair.

A high collared coat.

The profile of a tall man, turning now toward the opening.

With his eyes ice blue.

For a second, Lee's eyes had turned blue.

A gaze of knowing recognition settles on her, peers into her.

Her heart quickens and her mouth goes dry. There is a man in her guest. There is a strange, tall, white man in her guest room---and clothes are in the closet, his boots beside the bed, a book in hand and the plant, the damned plant that he must have put there. As if he lives there. Has always lived there.

He cocks his head to the side, observing her, begins to step toward her. Cautiously, slowly. She waits. She holds still and waits.

Something within her tugs and strains. Reaches. Toward him.

"What." she starts, swallows and licks her lips. "What are you doing in myhouse."

He arches a brow. Like a challenge. Like a dare. Her heart lurches. A chill goes down her spine. His mouth quirks at her, smirking.

"At last. Welcome home"


	7. Chapter 7

_Run._

You had questions and now an answer has manifest in your house and you should run. She takes off at a bolt, away from the room, down the steps only to be confronted by the same man waiting for her at the bottom. She stumbles on the stairs backtracking to go back up to find he has cornered her there too.

"I could do this for an immeasurable amount of time." he says. "I am a case study in patience."

Pulse racingshe turns back down the steps and keeps running even when he appears there, right, through, him and hears him gasp with the impact as she reaches for the front door he roars behind her. "Don't----"

But then she's outside. Cold night air clears her head and convinces her it was a dream. Some horrible, unfathomable dream. Panting and breathless and determined she won't find rest in the house this night, she keeps running, racing through the woods, on the path toward the lake to Jenny's trailer. She bangs on the door in frustration, realizing she doesn't have a key, but adrenaline and fear and whatever sparking thing that lurks in her veins, freshly awoken in full throttle blasts the door and it swings open invitingly. She lurches in, shutting it tight behind her, and watches in horror and fascination as the lock repairs.

No. This is you, Abbie. she thinks to herself, This is every bit you, nothing like the magic you thought you had. This is real, untapped, dormant power bubbling to the surface. But how.

Her world is upside down. For the first time in her life, a question she never needed to ask comes to her mind. Loud, clear, shocking in it's clarity.

Who Are You?

Back pressed against the door, she looks around. She's never been inside the trailer, only chatted to Jenny outside on the step. The day Jenny was packing into her truck and she'd come upon a pile of things Jenny had simultaneously been sorting through. Inside here, alone, without Jenny's sharp hawk eye watching over her, suspicion coils in her mind.

There has always been something guarded about her knew friend. Things she skirted around. Now, with access to everything Jenny left behind while on her sojourn, Abbie knows that here too, dwells more things she may regret finding. She begins to wander, eyes casting about.

But she has to know----there must be explantations----

Tears sprout to her eyes.

"Oh my God." her legs give out beneath her and her hands clap over her mouth to stifle the screams of fright, confusion and impossible. And sorrow.

There's a picture beside the bed on the nightstand. Of a much younger Jenny with her arm wrapped another, small statured woman. And two men. One with a kind face that she feels distantly protective of.

The other, the man she just saw in her house.

And the woman,

is her.


	8. Chapter 8

Hours.

She stares at this picture for hours. Amidst this maelstrom of emotions she wills it to burst into flames. She's so angry. She's so lost and confused. How can any of this be possible.

She tries to tell herself it can't be her in this picture with Jenny and the others. After all, hadn't Jenny said she looked like the deceased sister?

But how much can someone look alike? She's a dead ringer for the woman in the photo. From her height to her eyes, to the smile.

After, she had glanced at the pile of ash and felt remorse for destroying Jenny's belongings and with a disconcerting amount of ease, the bits fluidly reformed into the picture, good as new.

It makes her stomach churn. She hates it. She hates this part of herself that is now an unknown variable to her. This easy, second nature inexplicable thing. These connections that create more wholes in her life than they fill. The nonsense of it.

It's nonsense.

After all, if this is her in this picture how come she doesn't remember Jenny at all? how come she hasn't aged and turned grey. In the photo the woman and Jenny can be no more than two, three, four at most years apart. Jenny is now easily twenty to thirty older than her. It makes, no, sense.

And then there's the man in her house. The one in this very picture that her traitorous heart warms for before it ices over. What she feels when she looks at his face is a shifting tide of fondness and fear.

Don't ask her how the two can coexist but they do.

Perhaps because she knows he shouldn't be, but yet he is.

Back at the house, she fears. Waiting for her.

Weary but determined, Abbie rises from the floor. She takes in the entirety of the trailer, the cabinets. Drawers. She will turn this place inside out if need be.

She's gone too far now to turn back.

* * *

 

With trembling fingers, Abbie opens her own front door. "Hello" she calls. "I know you're there." she says more forcefully. She's not about to be driven mad in her own home, and if so---she's going to fight whatever it is. "I know you're here." she insists. She checks over her shoulder, pokes her head into the dining room and glances warily up the stair case, expecting him to appear, but he doesn't. And she honestly considers convincing her self she's made everything up until she enters the kitchen, and there are two cups on the counter. The smell of coffee wafts through the room.

Hackles raised, she approaches cautiously, keenly aware and unsettled by the crackle hum of magic lying calmly in wait should she call upon it. She wills it to roll back, to bury itself deep under her harmless tricks and works of wonder, to become a peculiar talent and not a real tangible thing.

It senses her hesitation to embrace it, and mercifully, gutters out. For now. She's not ready to start fighting battles with immaterial things. It sounds hard headed, but she'd like to have a go at this man, ghost, whatever the hell with a knife or bat first before she resigns herself to this new weird fate.

As she draws near she notices that both cups are full, topped with cream and sprinkles of cinnamon. She glances around still, calls for him one last time. "Show yourself" she demands, but there is only the ring of her one lone voice in the house.

Insanity, her mind prods, it's bonafide, insanity, for you to even entertain, drinking this cup.

It goes against everything you know.

Didn't mother tell you not to take food from strangers?

Especially, presumably, dead ones?

Doesn't something bad, always happen to characters in fairytales and books, and tv shows, when they accept offerings like this?

This isn't damned Alice in wonderland, she chides herself irritably. Sitting down stubbornly she eyes the cups but doesn't drink. "I'm not drinking this damned hex mex coffee until you----" her voice breaks. She's arrived at wits end too soon, but after the discoveries she made at the trailer and with Jenny gone, her only hope for…..anything resembling sense, resides with the man in her house. The perfect stranger. "Until, until you, come out here and, talk to me."

The air goes still, and the temperature drops.

She sits up straighter. "Hello?" she slides off the stool, straining tohear footsteps, pages flipping, anything. Instead something like breeze comes through, it whisks the heat off the coffee and blows away most of the cream and foam. What remains are the pools of coffee in both cups, but now the milk breaks the surface and spells words.

As she reads them, she can hear his voice rumbling in her ear.

My name, is Ichabod Crane.

"And?" she asks the empty room. "What else. Come out here now, Ick--ich--Icha…bod"

No. the word appears in the cups.

"Listen I'll call an, exorcist, or priest, something, toget you out my house."

_Crane._

She gapes at it. "What?"

_Crane._

_Crane. Crane._

It writes itself again and again slowly in the coffee.

"Crane?"

A strange illustration floats to the surface and it takes a moment for her to realize its his face. Smiling at her. It's so, silly, it startles a weak laugh from her. A delirious chuckle before she knocks both cups to the floor and they splinter. "What are you doing here."

I live here

"That's not possible----"

"Anything is possible, leftenant," his voice fills the air, surrounding her, but he will not show his face.

"What?"

"Do not be so quick to dismiss that which you do not understand. Our lives, after all, are founded upon such---"

"No I mean." she swallows thickly.

"What did you call me?"

* * *

 

_An assurance is on the tip of her tongue, it really is. But the cry of release is what comes out instead. "Lee" she says finally, holding him still, close, safe, still joined. "Lee" there are other words she wants here. She knows other words, questions muddle and curdle in her mind, but his name is all that escapes her at present. Her eyes flutter closed._

_"Abbie," he answers. And then._

_Leftenant._

* * *

 

"What I have always called you, I believe you termed it, a 'pet name'"

"Pet name" she balks. "And who am I to you? Who could you possibly be---you know what? this, is ridiculous." she concludes. "I reject it.I rejectit, and everything from yesterday to now. It's all, bull, because…..because you're dead, aren't you, and I'm not, and I don't know you so you can't possibly mean anything to me and I can't be anything to you---"

"My calling." his voice intones. "My destiny, fate entwined."

Foot falls start but Abbie can't tell which direction they come from, only that suddenly there are feet, and then legs materializing before her, drawing closer as the rest of him appears. "My beginning, my end. My Everything." tears glimmer in his eyes. Somewhere deep and forgotten, far away within her softens. It terrifies her.

"My Hope"

He reaches toward her but she steps back, arms stretched before her, warding him away."You're dead."

He is quiet.

"You are, aren't you," the answering silence breaks her. "Why are you here?" she shouts."If you're dead, what keeps you here, why don't you go to rest---why don't you leave?"

"I did once." he steps closer. "But never again. I will never leave you." he vows.

"Is that a threat?"

The coldness of him grows closer until the proximity turns to warmth. His voice is low and confidential in her ear. Imbued with deep sincerity.

"No, Abbie."

She holds her breath.

"It's a promise."

She backs up too fast, tripping over nothing and crashes to the floor, banging her head. She sees stars. She sees thread.

She blacks out and wakes up, alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A ghost just vowed to stay by her side.......um......well then.


	9. Chapter 9

The day passes in eerie quiet. No shifting and movement upstairs, no baritone voice declaring impossible things. Just her, and the journal, that she is reaching tentatively toward when the phone rings. Rising too quickly her head spins, she still has a headache from smacking her head on the floor, and staggers toward her cell phone, still in her jacket from the night before.

"Hello?"

"Hey,"

Lee.

"Hey," Abbie replies, breathless and grateful, working through already in her mind how she will tell her husband the house is haunted. And that the spirit, ghost, Ichabod Crane---what kind of crock name is that----has vowed to stay by her side---she doesn't recall asking him to that----and that she's pretty sure she may have actual powers and that she's related to Jenny Mills but she left town so she can't confirm for sure and that none of this could be possible unless one horrible thing is true.

She can't entertain it. She won't.

"You okay?"

"How are you," she counters, pulling her feet up beneath her on the couch, clutching the phone close. "How is the multitude?" she tries to joke but her voice cracks,betraying her.

"Abbie," Lee presses. She feels the deep prodding concern of it as if he's right there in the room with her.

"Are they having fun?" she cuts in again.

"They just barely stayed awake during a tour. Myself included," he rushes on. "How's Jenny?" he asks, changing tact.

"She---" ---might be my sister, skipped town---- "Couldn't come. She's gone on a trip. What a coincidence!"

"You don't sound right." he says. "There's something wrong. I knew I shouldn't have left."

"It's the house Lee," she says at last.

On the other end, his heart rate spikes. He knows it, in some half lit dim corner of his brain, he's felt off since that day when he wandered into the guest. Since they discovered that plant. He's seen the strange distance growing in her eyes, a fascination,a pull, toward an Other, has feltwithin himself an unhinging, as if he's not entirely whole. He had feared how to broach it---and that should have concerned him further---they have never been a pair who hide things from the other. They're plenty odd enough, what else could there be to conceal?

"What's happening" he asks heatedly. "Tell me,"

"There's a-----" the line cuts off and Lee sits in shock before he picks up the phone again to call the authorities.

* * *

 

Abbie presses back into the couch, watching in rapt horror as the pale, long fingered hand appears from nowhere, prying the phone gently, and with little struggle from her hands, and setting it on the opposite side of the room.

"What do you want," she gasps."What do you want here, what do you need to make you leave."

"Apologies," his voice calls from every corner at once. Warm, resonant, raising the hairs on her skin. It feels like it's surrounding her, enveloping her, cloaking her like a blanket, closing in. But there is only his hand, floating about the room. "I fear, we got off on the wrong foot."

"You're haunting my house," she snaps. "You, you chased me like, like, like a----"

"Ghost," he supplies helpfully.

"That!"

"As I'm sure you've deduced, Mrs. Richards."

It's impossible, but she hears a sneer curling in his words.

"I am not a restful soul."

"No I'd wager you're not." she says, scanning the room, wondering at the odds he'll pop in her way if she makes a break for the door.

"I…..lived a very, tumultuous, troubled life, Mrs. Richards,"

"Abbie," she corrects, because the way he says her married name sounds like a curse in his mouth.

The room flushes with a sudden warmth, a mild reddish glow. She'd say it was blushing. When he speaks again, his voice mild and a little shy, she's amazed to realize it's doing exactly that. He's blushing and so the room is too.

"Abbie. I lost a woman, very, gravely, dear to me. Her loss tormented me to no end. When she crossed, my body revolted entirely in its desperation to follow her, and I perished, too." his voice dwindles away and the floating hand disappears.

"And?" she says, skeptic of the sudden abandonment. "Then what….."

"Crane," he insists. "Please, Crane."

"Then, what, Crane," she grinds out.

"Her soul found rest. But mine did not. So I remain here."

Rising to her feet, cautiously, always cautiously now, Abbie peers around her, casts a glance at Grace's journal. Wonders if it can be helpful, in some way. "Earlier, earlier you spoke like you knew me. Called me….Left---leftenant."

"The woman I lost, it was her profession,"

"You knew my name"

"She bore it, also."

"I don't understand."

"A case of mistaken identity, Abbie, nothing more. You look so very much alike."

"I don't know what cool aid you drink on the other side, or if you've been slipping Jenny some, but I'm not about to buy the coincidence that I just happen to resemble this woman. You knew Jenny, didn't you?" she accuses, trying to narrow down her focus. The energy in her veins hums that it can help, just release, it coaxes. Wary of it still but feeling as though she needs everything in her arsenal, for a moment, Abbie frees her mind.

A wind gusts through the space with a sharp whistle and suddenly there is Crane, standing not nearly as far away as she would have liked, looking at her contemplatively.

"Yes," he intones. "I knew Jennifer Mills."

"And the sister, also, named Abbie."

"Yes. Her too."

"The other guy…."

"Joe Corbin. A trustworthy, honourable young man. He went first. The leftenant. Then I. Miss Jenny alone survives us."

"You'd think after one hunting accident the rest of you would clue in."

His mouth curls. "We were hard learners, Abbie. We did not…..we did not…..we erred, often, in our affairs. Especially those of our hearts."

"Why are you here," she repeats. "Say I believe this grand spooking coincidence. Mistake made, forgiven, get out of my house."

"I am tethered here, Abbie, it can't be helped."

"Oh?" she feels saucy now that she can see him, and the reassuring pulse of power tells her she can probably blink herself out of sight if she had a mind to.

"Help me find peace," he entreats.

"And how exactly am I supposed to help with that?"

"Help me….connect, with her. Help me find, her, again Abbie, and my restlessness will cease."

"What makes you think I can help? That I would?"

"You have ability, do you not?" he glances pointedly at the journal.

"You know something about me, what is it"

"Only that you are chosen. I cannot say more than that."

"Chosen, chosen for what" she spits.

He shakes his head irritably. "You must agree." he says. "You must agree or I can never be free, never leave here" he begins to fade.

A ghost? Stay?She flings an arm out, calling after him, feeling insanity nestle in her brain, for surely that's what this is."Wait. Wait, we'll make a deal. I'll….help you cross over….properly. And you'll….if I have questions you'll answer."

"One a day, and only if indirect" His voice has the nerve to barter with her.

"What?"

"Agree!" his voice booms desperately.

"Fine!" she shouts back. He snaps back into focus. He smiles.

She huffs and turns away from him. "If you….anything. Anything, weird," she pinches the bridge of her nose. This is, weird."anything…I…I will…blast, you." she threatens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and now Abbie's bargaining with the ghost


	10. Chapter 10

The thundering knock at the door moments after the apparition vanishes wearies Abbie further. What now, what one earth now. When she grasps the handle a badge is flashed in her face and she staggers away from it. Something about the gesture, aside from being intrusive feels familiar. Makes her feel almost insulted. Who are they to flash credentials before her when she's wielded such name plates and passes of power---but she hasn't. No, she hasn't. 

"Officer Corey Reynolds"

Corey Reynolds is a shade lighter than Abbie, with her hair a tumble cross of tight and loose curls. Across her nose is the faintest hint of freckles, and dark glint to the eyes that narrow suspiciously as they sweep over her. "I received a distress call."

"Distress?"

"Are you Mrs. Richards?"

"Yes…."

"Lee Richards called in to say he was on the phone with his wife when the line got cut off. He was very concerned. Said she---you, sounded distraught."

"It's a new house," Abbie hedges vaguely, shifting under Corey's scrutiny. There's something about the woman's eyes that are altogether too, astute, keen. "It's the first time he's gone away," she pretends to fluster. "But nothing's wrong officer, I'm alright."

Corey's eyes peer over Abbie's head, corners of her mouth pulled down in a frown. Abbie looks too, worried that the resident ghost is standing there in plain view but there's just the empty hall. Corey's eyes trail back to her.

"You're sure you're alright," she whispers. "No one else here, hiding somewhere, threatening you? holding you captive?"

And she knows, the instant she does it, that it does not in any way assure Officer Reynolds that nothing is amiss. But considering she just bartered with a ghost who is holed up in her guest room---Abbie cracks, and laughs.

* * *

 

Rattled by the woman's burst of delirious laughter Corey Reynolds gets in her car and her fingers tremble. She has long let her parents stories of a brief stint in supernatural go stale in her mind. They'd even said over the years that sometimes the period was so fleeting they mutually thought they'd imagined it. But some details had clung, one of which had been the death of their dear friend and colleague, and her father, his girlfriend, Abbie Mills.

Sophie and Daniel wouldn't get together, accidentally, until nearly two years after Abbie died. A poorly planned one night. But after, when it yielded life, they'd agreed to co-parent, and grudgingly fell properly in love when she was fifteen. Married the year after. They'd been gone from Sleepy Hollow, relocated to Washington for nearly ten years by then. Had been living there since.

It was Corey who came back, because a position opened up here, and she'd wanted more out of the place where her parents had met. But she hadn't anticipated that the 'more' would be a presumably dead woman from their past.

Danny had shown her a picture years and years ago. Him and Abbie Mills shortly after they had reconciled, shortly before she died in an explosion,they'd called it.

Supernaturally triggered, but an explosion.

She'd be lying if she hadn't been out for a taste of the abnormal when she came here, to validate whether or not her parents were kooks.

But this.

When she gets off her beat and she's back home in her apartment she dials back home. Her mother answers on the first ring.

"What is it Scamp," she calls, a smile in her voice.

"You remember what you told me about her?"

"Her who,"

"You know who, Abbie," Corey rasps.

"Abbie," Sophie trails off, her eyes going far away. Daniel looks up from his cup of coffee and their guest pauses with the cup half way to her lips. "What about Abbie."

Corey tries to explain and Sophie clears her throat aggressively. Impossible. They'd given them a fools errand when her death was fresh. A new witness, reborn, all that drivel. She looks down at her slowly spotting hands, and Daniel's solid breadth, a girth that refused to go pudgy and became thick and wall like instead. The grey at his temples and the lines around her mouth, she can feel them there now as she frowns, wanting to tell her daughter to stop chasing ghosts. There is nothing worth being fascinated with in that weird world. Nothing but irretrievable loss and lives turned inside out.

"'Not a ghost, mom." Corey insists. "She lives there, in that house. Her husband called in worried and I got sent out there, and it was her."

"Corey," Sophie hisses. "Stop it." Hope, after all these years? What kind of cruel trick is this to have something restored, given a balm, for a wound that just finished healing, although haphazardly, on its own?

"Mom."

"It's not her. It can't be." she emphasizes. "She's dead. Dead. Alright?"

On the other end her mothers firm tone sobers her. "Right. Sorry to bother you. How's dad."

"He's fine." Sophie replies, softening. "I hope you're taking care of yourself. Getting enough sleep," she says meaningfully, to convey she thinks Corey's call is spawned from exhaustion.

"Headed to bed right now," her daughter replies dutifully.

"Good." Sophie nods. "Goodnight sweetheart. I love you."

"Love you too Mom, give dad my love."

"Will do Scamp. Night."

The rest of the room has been hung in suspension while Sophie finished the call, and she hangs up and rest the phone gingerly on the table and turns stiffly toward Daniel and their guest. Her eyes narrow and her voice cracks. "I thought the visit was strange, wasn't expecting you until Christmas. But you're gonna tell me now Mills."

Jenny bites her lip and turns her head away.

"You're gonna tell me why my daughter just called to say," Sophie chokes, voice shaking with decades of suppressed tears of confusion and hurt "Called to say that Abbie Mills is alive and living in that old house."

Across from her, Danny has gone ashen, his fingers slacken around the mug and he sets it down shakily, slumping down in the chair. His eyes glitter with tears, asking a question that Jenny wants direly to answer and deny. Because what will it mean now to any of them? They cannot all go rushing to her now, professing long histories and friendships and family. She's theirs but she's not. But she can't take the way they're looking at her. Blinking her eyes shut and tucking a strand behind her ear Jenny takes a deep breath and is dismayed by how steady, though hoarse her voice is.

"Because it's true."

A choked sob emanates from Danny, who somehow finds enough strength in his shock and renewed grief and hope to pitch away from the room, staggering as far away as possible so the women won't hear him cry.

So Sophie, his wife, won't hear him keening for a wound reopened in his heart for another.


	11. Chapter 11

Abbie should feel anything but relieved to be alone in this house now, but she's not really, alone, now, is she.

She doesn't call for him because she's too rankled from the bargain they made earlier and the odd Officer and Abbie direly wants to sleep in her bed, and wake to find Lee there, and that all of this, even the more persistent crackling feeling in her veins, were a dream.

Warily, she pads by the guest room door, open a crack, enough for her to see the light is on and the veil still drawn, that she can see the profile of him shuffling around in there, muttering to himself, pages fluttering. She doesn't pause to reassure herself of his reality.

This is one thing, one night, one, day, that Abbie does not want to prove is real. She opens and then shuts the bedroom door behind her, and for extra measures, even hating the appearance of this awakened dormant gift, she waves her fingers toward the door and a lock appears. She wills it to hold against all forces, even spiritual. Because if discovering she has powers doesn't enable her to lock a spectre out of her room, then what damn good isit at all. Alone, weary, and now shivering, Abbie strips off her clothes, letting them pile on the floor as she moves to the en suite and turns on the faucets in the tub. The water is too hot to start but perhaps a good scalding will scale off the layer of unknown and strange that has settled on her skin, on her being, like a film.

She has powers. Actual ones.

She saw the face of Grace Dixon as she perused that Journal…..it's Jenny's ancestor….hers.

Unfathomable as it is, Abbie has to make herself think it. Somehow, she's related to Jenny. Her sister.

But if that's true.

Then she…..

She……

"Joe Corbin. A trustworthy, honourable young man. He went first. The leftenant. Then I."

"I died," she whispers hoarsely, and she begins to gasp with the fright and panic of it washing over her again.

But then "A case of mistaken identity, Abbie, nothing more. You look so very much alike." swirls in her mind.

So which is it?

Am I her or not?

He asked you to find her. She repeats to herself, trembling even with the water so warm. "He wouldn't do that if you were right in front of him, right? He's….he's dead but not crazy….right?"

Her words bounce back at her off the tile.

"He's dead but not crazy…….right?

right?

….right?"

* * *

 

Lee lies on his back, staring up at the ceiling. He received a phone call shortly after that an officer had been out to the house and all was well. He'd called back to be sure but the phone had gone to her machine, and he could only hope that the officer didn't have some insidious reason to lie to him. Across the room slumbers one of the other teachers, burly, snoring man who has been keeping Lee up. Tomorrow they sight see with the crew but frankly Lee feels drained. He wonder's fleetingly if he's coming down with something. Just as he thinks it his nose clogs and he finds himself swinging his feet out of the bed and shuffling towards the bathroom, tearing off toilet paper, forming a thick wad and blowing generously into it. I'd know, he assures himself. If Abbie was in trouble, if something was wrong, I'd know. He nods tightly and then looks in the mirror. He frowns as he plucks a tattered thread from his shoulder and winces from the soreness of his scar. He still can't remember how he reopened something so long healed, nor why it continues with this pulsing ache now.

Tossing the tissue he washes his hands and while doing so his eyes cross and he staggers away from the sink.

Fever. He thinks. I'm running a fever.

For while he washed his hands, they had changed into another pair, someone else's, long fingered, elegant white hands.

He blinks in dazed confusion at his reflection, at his eyes that flash briefly, ice blue.

* * *

He sniffles and blows. Quite pleased with himself. A bodily function such as blowing ones nose, why he's had so little need for it for so long, seems a bizarre gift. He washes his hands----another vaguely and briefly restored luxury and studies the mirror. Nothing gazes back out at him.

That at least hasn't changed. Soon the passing sensation of water on his hands wanes and he merely watches the fluid run through him, as if he's not even there.

For now.

* * *

 

Sophie stares down Jenny as Danny leaves. Turning a deliberately deaf ear to the sounds of a man having a breakdown in the hall. She can't be mad at him, really. She understood back then that his feelings for Abbie had been strong. How it had warred with his new position as her boss, how their getting back together in her final moments had made him beam from ear to ear. At last he had her.

Then he lost her.

He'd been told she was gone. He'd never had a chance at good bye.

Had he known that Abbie's spirit had used the last of her strength to say farewells to Crane---who would thereafter stubbornly, selfishly cling to her until she severed ties----he'd have been demolished.

Sophie never thought he was 'over' Abbie. He'd just managed to put her aside, and had determined to make himself move on and feel again. She'd never wanted Daniel Reynolds, no.

* * *

 

She was in the middle of a frustrating case, not long transferred out of Danny's jurisdiction---she'd needed distance----and of course they collided again during a mission.

They were tense and tight with one another, both chafing against the unresolved and bizarre circumstances that had ransacked their lives in such a short span. They finished the job and grabbed dinner. A completely sober dinner.

He got talking about Abbie. Got morose about her and Sophie had sulked too---she never had a chance then when Abbie was alive, but she had suspected that whatever apocalyptic mess her and Crane were involved in, might have explained, eventually, the disappearance of her own parents.She'd also come to value her as a peer and friend.

"Sometimes I just want her to hold me," he'd said, voice broken but dry eyed. She'd reached for his hand, stroking it with her thumb, and then leaned into him.

"You'll have to do with me Reynolds," she'd joked.

A sad laugh, before his arms wrapped around her in turn. It was comfort, it was companionable. It was two people who couldn't make sense resolving to be in the dark together. It wasn't supposed to turn into a kiss and a whimper and the irrational fleeing of the restaurant and not even being able to make it to a hotel before they were clumsily clamouring over the seats in the car and fogging up windows.

It had been a moment Sophie hadn't wanted, had never craved, but then it happened and it was nice to be touched and to feel and she hadn't been involved in a while---although she knew, under the circumstances, she was signing up for moron 101 doing this with Danny.

He went back to Sleepy Hollow.

And a month and a half later she had to return there too if for no other reason than to tell him he was going to be a father unless they made up their minds and fast.

She was surprised he begged her to keep it. It didn't mean they fell in love. No it meant she waddled around pretending the father was a man from her old home town and not the Sleepy Hollow Branch head. It meant later on that Danny would step in to the public eye like a solid work colleague and peer, helping her take care of her daughter, becoming a father figure, even going so far as to leave town when Sophie relocated again. It meant years of complicated false stories to other men she tried to date and other women he tried to date both of them fumbling awkward bringing their guests in the house while the other was there and Corey calling them mum and dad and all forms of nonsense.

Until one day he asked why they'd never tried. Properly, at them.

"Because how this started was stupid and grieving," she'd retorted.

"But we got her," he'd said, nodding over at Corey who was chewing her pencil while listening to her music doing homework.

Sophie had scoffed. "You saying you in love with me Reynolds?"

He'd shrugged. "I'm saying I could love you. If we tried."

"Love isn't suppose to be something you 'try'"

"No but you try for things you want, right? work for them? I want happy Sophie." he'd turned his gaze away then. "I want wife and child and home"

"And I'm just already the perfect set up, right?"

"I never told you to tell all those lies about me." he retorted. "I never asked you to cover up for my jobs sake, in fact I told you, I don't care if they know. You think anyone really believed I was just hanging around for fun?"

"They believed you were keen about Corey. They just didn't know she was really your daughter."

"You know you're just like Mills," he'd cursed, walking away from her. "Just all around damn difficult to let people in."

"We have a sixteen year old daughter I don't think it was 'that difficult' for me to let someone 'in'"

"Forget it Foster."

"Listen I'm not Abbie, alright? I knew it was a mistake the minuteit happened because your hearts with her, it always will be, and I'm not gonna step into a dead woman's shoes. What we got isn't ideal but at least it isn't a shadow. I refuse to live in one Reynolds."

"If you're saying you're holding back from me, because you're afraid I'll make you a place holder for Abbie, then that's exactly what you're doing."

He didn't stay in the house that night.

For all their years of staunch, friendly, co parenting, yes, even sharing a roof, raising Corey together, who knew at a young age she had two parents who loved her very much but didn't love each other----yet lived together---an irksome thing to explain for all parties involved, for all of that, Danny not staying, and his consequent withdrawal, had felt akin to a divorce.

Two months of him asking for Corey on the phone and bypassing her and suddenly one night she gets a call that Danny went in on a gang bust but hasn't been heard from.

It's hours after, sweat dripping down her face with blood shattered glass and Danny's swollen face lolling to the side that she berates him as they load him into the ambulance. The mobster in the ambulance opposite. They'd got their man.

But Danny got, got, too.

"Since when are you reckless, eh Reynolds? since when do you go off grid? Look I don't need any more adventurers or Heroes in my life, alright?"

The monitor was beeping steadily.

"I don't need to be one of those people left behind by the ones they love because they had to be a hero. I've seen what that does to people. My parents already did it to me. You're gonna wake up and tell me why you risked your life going in there alone----"

"Did you say you love me?" he'd croaked groggily.

"They hit you worse than I thought"

"I know what I heard"

* * *

It was rocky and odd in the beginning but then falling was maddeningly easy. He had her heart when he asked and she said yes, finally realizing it had been so many years in the making, no matter how haphazard it had begun. He's given her fantastic years since.

So her heart hurts for him, assaulted anew by this glimmer of something lost. She doesn't know what it means for him, for them, but whatever comes next, if Jenny speaks the truth and hasn't lost her mind at last, she's prepared for it.

"Mills," she says sternly. Jennifer became the one connection to the past that they would maintain, the only one who had known the truth about Corey and them before they'd left town. She's kept up with them since, spends the holidays. She's Corey's Godmother, for crying out loud.

They didn't have much after so much loss.

But those who had survived had dared to cobble together a family. A makeshift thing that's held them together for so long. "Mills how can you be sure?" Sophie presses.

"You know your sister." Jenny replies. "No matter the time or place, you know her."

* * *

 

Crane had frowned, watching the officer depart, something compelling about her gait. Like an amalgamation of two parts he'd met once before. But then he was back to perusing the shelves. He can't seem to move on properly from the last book he held while he breathed. The pages flip but its always the same text. Within the confines of this room time stands still, no matter how irritated he's become with it. Each book on the shelf permanently bookmarked on the last page he'd read before he died. A infuriating fact given that these aren't even the samebooks. He's stalled it would seem. But he hopes, he craves direly, to move on.

And she'll help him, he knows. She has always been stalwart and true.

Whether she remembers it or not.

He listens for the water to stop running, and the silence that follows, willing himself not to panic---after all he can't account for what should become of him if she perishes in such an innocuous way as drowning in the tub. What hope would there be for him then? for them?

Restless, he had gone to the bedroom door and found himself forcefully repelled. He grumped at that. She wouldn't have been so apt to embrace powers in her old life and he finds her willingness to wield it now an inconvenience to him. A defence that he can't afford. Irritable, he'd gone back to the guest and overcome by the alien but welcome need to blow his nose. He hears movement shortly after he's washed his hands and assumes she's unharmed and gone to bed.

He tries to knock on the door again before he retires but his hand reverberates back at him, knocking up against an unseen barrier.

This will get in the way, he discerns, none to fond of the magic so handy at her fingers.

He heaves a sigh and evaporates until morning.

Buthe does not rest.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Comments are life!!!! 
> 
> Please please comment!

When Abbie wakes up it's to the comforting warm weight of Lee's arm slung over her, effectively caging her in the bed with him. She feels him tighten just a little bit as she shifts and so knows that he's awake, willfully holding her captive there.

"Let go," she teases.

A sleepy but playful reply. "Never."

"Let go Lee, come on, I've missed you too but come on," she laughs as his grip gets firmer, pulling her closer.

"Never," he whispers, breath hoton her ear. An undercurrent in his tone that promises, vows, pledges himself to her. The growl beneath it makes her shiver just a little in a warm tingling way. She makes a mock sound of disapproval.

"You're not going anywhere," he breathes. "I won't let you,"

"I'll have to get up at some point. To pee, for starters,"

A swift movement finds her laid out on her back with him looming over her, only his face seems blurred by shadow. The calm steadiness in her heart quickly splinters, shaken. "Lee?"

His hand caresses her face, and she feels the heat rolling off of him as he draws closer but still his features are distorted. "I'm not letting you go, Abbie. Never again."

He presses a hand down on her chest, over her heart, she feels a jolt, she convulses, her breath stolen, her mind a starburst, eyes lit up with blinding light-----

* * *

 

A dream.

She sits upright in the bed, gasping and quivering. It was a dream. A horrible, awful, dream. The shuffle of feet outside her door make her eye it warily and then she is forced to return to the nightmare reality that there may very well still be a damn ghost in her house.

"Abbie?" his voice calls, not outside the room, but in there with her, throwing his voice from outside. "Are you well?" he persists. The timbre carries through the bedroom and somehow nestles down at her bedside.

She gathers enough wits about her to command a clearing, in case by some luck he bypassed her lock enchantment, but the wind whistles through the room and reveals nothing but empty spaces. It's just his voice inside with her, the spiritual him, in the hall.

"F-f-fine" she stammers, reaching for a robe.

A pause. "Are you sure?" It's impossible but the concern in his words seem to reach out to her, as if they could manifest themselves into something physical. "I heard you screaming."

"I did not---"

"You did"

"Wouldn't you? Your day starts out fine and by the end there's a 'dead man' squatting in your house."

He chuckles.

"This funny to you?" she snaps, swiping at the space where she last heard his rumbling tones, not caring that she can't harm him. "I'm going insane. I'm unhinging a day after making a lunatic bargain to help a fickle man cross over"

When the room goes silent and still Abbie fumbles out of the bed, hauling on shirt and sweats and grasps for her door handle, expecting him to be there, wringing his hands, maybe, or pacing. In this short span she's under the impression he fidgets. But the hall is empty, and her heart still pounds from the bizarre dream she had of Lee.

She's never dreamed something like that before. Abbie's never been prone to nightmares, certainly not featuring people she loves. Is he alright? she wonders, Does it mean something? She turns inward, to the deep rooted connection she has to her husband, trying to sense if something is amiss----for a frightening moment, she can't feel anything. She ices over with the sensation that he's vanished somehow, before her rationality kicks in, the surety, and her being settles. He's fine, she assures herself. He's fine.

In fact she reaches to pick up the phone to call him. After having Officer Corey Reynolds sent out the night before he must have been really worried.

But her hand wavers over the phone, unable to wall out the terrifying image in her dream of Lee turned predator, his hand pressing in, in, in to her chest, toward her heart, the rush of energy and a moment of terror, where she honestly believed she was dying. That he was hurting her.

She bites her lip and slips the phone in her pocket. After, she tells herself. She'll….she'll call him after she's had something to eat. And a good, strong, cup of coffee.

* * *

 

Waiting for her already on the counter. Her coffee. She saunters into the kitchen warily. "You there?" she asks as she advances. No reply.

When she reaches the cup she glances at the foam face that's been drawn in it, smirking at her. "Crane," she calls more firmly. "Can you quit showing off and try to act like a living person." she commands.

The foam face----"Unbelievable" she mutters---arches a brow at her. She arches one back in challenge. Registering a second too late that she's having a stand off with a cup of coffee. She grunts,before grasping the handle and taking a swig, swallowing the face and all, barely stifling a chuckle as she watched the face momentarily flash to an expression of horror as it raced toward her mouth. "There." she slams it down. "Crane. Show yourself. Now. I don't care if you lived here how ever long ago. This is my house now."

It's always been yours,

She shakes her head. "And you're going to play by some rules while in it. Being seen for starters."

When he appears it's head first, bent low before her, his entire frame positioned in an elegant bow. "As you wish, Abbie," he lifts his head just a bit, catching her eye and her heart flutters. Another small smile and he straightens his posture standing at his ridiculous height towering over her.

It can't be a good idea to keep a ghost taller than yourself around the house, can it? she wonders.

"Thank you." she mutters, and then goes to rummage in the fridge.

"You are still troubled." he ventures.

Eggs, I'll make an omelette-----

"Was it a dream?"

Do I have peppers----?

"A bad dream, Abbie? you can tell me---"

I'll need to make a run for groceries later---

"Never"flashes in her mind and she drops the carton of eggs. Her mind sends her careening back to the dream imprisonment in her bed. "I'm not letting you go Abbie. Never again"Her air chokes off and the edges of the room start to fill with shadows as her knees buckle.

"Abbie!"

* * *

 

When she comes to, he's at her side by the couch. Her eyes glance around, skittish, remembering where she is, the horror of the dream that assaulted her again in the kitchen and she begins to cry. She's never needed tobe too hard or strong this life. She is easier to break. She fractures, unexpectedly, decorum becoming tears and shivers and fear that she's never known before like ice dancing in her veins. "I'm here, I'm here, it's alright," He soothes. He rests a none to effective pale hand on her shoulder.

"He tried to hurt me," she gasps. "In my dream, he…..I don't know why, I've never….." she buries her face in her hands, desperate for calm, logic, for that imagery to become a vapour, a mist that clears away.

"Who?" Crane presses, concern etched in his features. So heavily invested in her well being.

"Lee."

"I'm afraid I do not know---"

"My husband. I had a nightmare that he was home with me and then….." she breaks down again, unable to put into words. The sensation that he was pushing down, forcing into her heart, flooding her with a powerful pain. "He would never hurt me, I know that." she says, voice weak and not convincing. "But….."

"Abbie," Crane begins cautiously. Her eyes slide to his. Shimmering over bright. He licks his lips. "Just, just as you, made some revelations about yourself yesterday, your latent abilities," he clarifies. For the moment her understanding of her self past and present is best left in fog. "You are, a little more, than what you thought. Perhaps….." Helooks into her face,for no reason at all she is desperate in her vulnerability for an explanation, for this insane moment she opts to trust him. He wills himself to finish the sentence that stalled on his tongue. "Perhaps, Lee, is more than you thought as well. Or less."

"Less?"

"Maybe you do not know him, Abbie. It stands to reason that since your powers have awakened you had this awful dream to show you something. A veil has lifted. Your senses are trying to warn you."

Confusion swarms across her features. "Warn me, about what---"

"Lee is not who he seems, Abbie. He is not the person you think you know."


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> many things. that's all i can say. 
> 
> Sometimes ghosts have bad manners.
> 
> Some secrets are not being told. 
> 
> Comments are love! <3

"I don't even _know you_ , but you think you know my husband better than me?"

Surprisingly, scathing and hurtful though the words are, she's teary as she asks it, and barely skeptic. It sounds morelike a script she knows she should follow. Because, after all, a spirit she's known less forty eight hours is trying to tell her she doesn't know a man that's had her heart under lock and key--and she his--- for nearly half of her life. But that fact now doesn't shake away the fear, doesn't give her the steadiness she needs.

His suggestion worms into her ears and to her dismay she finds herself looking back on their lives for clues, for hints that Lee changed over the years, or was never the man she thought.

Crane watches her carefully while trying to hide his own hurt. He swallows imperceptibly, feeling a flash of anger toward the man that has wrongly benefitted from so much.

It was never meant to go this way.

Had he known from the start, all those years ago----he'd have been less excitable in his haste to restore order. But no matter. He's here now.

He'll be here forever.

* * *

 

"How long?" Sophie gasps, growing more irritated by the second. "You met her how long ago?"

"She was sixteen, I couldn't tell her she was my dead sister come back. It was an accident. I wasn't even really sure."

"Damn it Mills, don't lie to me. You knew. You just said so yourself, 'You know your sister' You knew over a decade, nearly twenty, thirty years and you didn't tell us you'd seen Abbie? How could you keep that from us? from him?" she hisses, briefly questioning her sanity.

"Whether or not they had a past her last life, I don't think Danny would have been leaping at the chance tobone a minor incarnate. And if he was then we have a more serious problem."

"Your attitude right now? Astonishing. You drop a bomb on us and then act like we're the ones being irrational."

"Well you are." Jenny shouts, shooting up from her seat. "Him weeping down the hall and you getting all worked up with me, it's damn irrational because you know what? we're nothing to her." The fight fled as soon as it had come and Jenny goes back down in the seat as if blown by a strong wind. "We're nobodies. We have no meaning, no history, no connections. I'm just the odd woman she befriended---not her sister----" she swears as she feels herself breaking down into tears. Sophie is still mad but torn as she tentatively approaches Jenny in the chair. Sniffling Jenny swipes at her nose, running a hand through her hair.

"That's why I showed up," she confesses, blinkingher red eyes. "Because I couldn't take being around a sister who doesn't know she ever had one. Couldn't……couldn't keep searching and finding that bond and knowing she'd never recognize it. I'm not part of her life anymore Foster--" after all this time Foster is still her nickname-- "I'm……I don't know what I am but I'm not her sister" her voice cracks and the tears come fresh, another wave crashing on the shore. "Never will be, again"

"Jenny" Sophie admonishes.

Now of all times Cranes words after her sisters demise flash back to her. She'll always be ours. 

But she isn't. Jenny chokes---the waterworks won't dam. The well won't run dry. It seems taken of a mind to see if it could try and drown her inside out. She tastes her own salty tears on her lips, running down her cheeks and chin. She's not mine anymore, she can't be ever again.

* * *

 

Corey might get in trouble for this. It's not strictly job related. But she's not going to let her mother convince her she's lost her mind adjusting to stress of the new move. She knows who she saw.

She's not sure what else she means to prove---and honestly, she hasn't quite entirely thought through if there might be repercussions to finding proof, but she feels strangely compelled to find answers.

* * *

 

"How about a game Lef--Abbie" Crane just barely stops himself as he sweeps his arm toward the dining as an invitation. Abbie feels like she's underwater, she's still wiping away straggling tears and her head feels fuzzy from distress. She cocks her head at him. A gesture of such pure uncomplicated innocence it wounds him deeply. He shouldn't do this to her. She doesn't deserve this, he thinks.

"A _what?_ "

"Chess?" he continues, voice pitching up too high, and his image wavers ever so slightly, flashing to invisibility before blinking back into view like a television on the fritz. He curses and glances irritably at his shoulder, as if an unknown culprit lurks there for the disruption in his form. Still scowling he turns his attention back to her, desperate to keep his tentative grip on her attention. "A game of chess, to occupy your mind," he adds helpfully, offering a small smile.

A broken laugh burbles out and she takes a deep breath. "I need a drink," she huffs, running her fingers through her hair.

"Another coffee?"

"Coffee?" she barks incredulously. "No, something stronger."

"Abbie," he scolds, dismayed. "It's….it's not even noon."

Her eyes snap to his dancing with a light that borders dangerously on madness, he would say. And as it happens, madness _this soon_ doesn't serve his purpose. "A good stiff drink." he nods. "Of course," he rises to his feet, stuttering in visibility again and making a distinct sound of annoyance before Abbie calls out.

"I'll get it," she grunts as she stands, wavering a moment before she strides past him.

"Allow me---"

"My house." she snaps. "Still my damn house and I'll be damned if I let you start strolling around the place like….like you belong here,"

Gutted, Crane goes still. "Abbie----"

" _You're dead_ "

"Abbie"

She whirls on him. " _You don't belong here_ " she snaps. "Alright? You're dead. So you don't belong here. You need to move on to the other side, and that's what we're going to focus on. As soon as I have a drink because at least then I'll be too fuzzy and loose to have any more attacks like that."

"That wasn't merely an attack---"

"You let me decide on that Crane."

And confrontational and defensive as her tone sounds, it feels oddly like home to him. She's in there, he thinks warmly. Some part of that spit fire hard shell woman is in there, beneath all of the uncomplicated gentleness and normalcy that this version has known.She leaves him standing in the living room, storming into the kitchen she emerges with a bottle, a tumbler, surveying him. "Can you…." she points vaguely at his stomach.

"Imbibe?" he asks,corner of his mouth turning up. "I've not had any invitations in a long time. I must confess I do not know."

She purses her lips. "If….if you have….grip, grab a glass. You been blipping out today, you alright?" ----and did I inquire after the health of a ghost? she wonders.

"Perfectly fine," he answers though his voice his tight. There's a vexing ache on his shoulder. The absence of something.She narrows her eyes at him and squares her shoulders. Putting on a mantle of bravery that she doesn't know how to don properly this time around. 

"Drink," she says. "And…I'll have a sandwich, and then we'll play….. _chess_. And we're gonna start talking how to help you cross. Clear?

He fidgets, nods once, "Crystal."

"Good"

She shuffles off leaving him standing there. Alone for a beat Crane snarls as he shrugs a sleeve out of his coat, reaching down his collar to feel the wound on his arm.Dry as a bone. Almost healed. "Damn it" he curses. "Damn. It."

* * *

 

Lee dabs the cut with alcohol and puts a bandage on before he pulls on his sweater and coat, chancing a glance in the mirror before he sets foot out the door to lead the student group with his peers. His eyes gaze back at him. Hazel as the day he was born. He discards a thread as he winds his scarf around his neck.

 

* * *

Crane gapes, flabbergasted as her dark fluttering hands lead another aggressively quick charge across the board, winning what must be the fifth game.

They've been here the better part of the morning. She leaves intermittently for food but returns here where they match wits. And he's a little put out, if not simultaneously proud that she is able to best him so even better than before. She far out paces him.

"Are you sure you like this game?" she drawls lazily. About as often as she eats, she's been drinking too, and she seems more mellow now. More at ease if not a little hazy, drifting in and out of conversation while she eyes the pieces on the board.

"I did," he admits, watching her reset. "When I was any match for my opponent."

"Hmmph" she chortles, small secret smile that he remembers so well. "I have a lot of practice." she sobers. "With Lee. We met on chess team, in high school, actually. We were such nerds." She nods to him. "Another game?"

To be honest, spending the day here at the chessboard was not his idea, and it's not ideal for his plans. But he's felt significantly, weaker, lesser, since his blip this morning and he worries too much effort put into movement or pulling any of his other spirit tricks will render him effectively, permanently useless. It's too early in the game for that.

Much too early.

So remaining stagnant here at the table preserves his energies. "Of course," he nods.

Without glancing up she makes her first move and continues to talk. "We were on chess, debate, the same writers craft course---it'sa wonder we ended up the way we have. Me doing magic….performance magic," she feels a need to correct. "Illusions, escapes. Him, stunting, daring all of a sudden. All of a sudden we went from being brains to brave." her voice falters."And then I couldn't stay away from him and he couldn't stay away from me. Something changed between us, it might have been there, in a way all along but, it got, stronger, somehow…..it felt like the inevitable, but it felt like a relief to give in. It's scary to give so much and actually receive it back." she pauses, gone momentarily wistful and sentimental.  "To have all of him, and he has all of me. Your move,"

Crane snaps out of the trance her words had woven around him, trying to make a decent play while he keeps the roiling sensation of his being at bay. He's affronted if not intrigued by her description. It hits so close to home.

And anger, hot and salty like blood spurts up in his mouth before he wrestles it back under control. Patience, he warns himself. Be patient.

"You seem to share a unique bond," he replies in measured even tones.

Her hand stills as she ponders whether to move knight or Queen. "It's a deep love. Nothing I've ever known before, that's for sure."

His fury comes so fast he has no control over what happens next.

The board catches fire. His form blinks out of existence with rage.

"Crane!" she shouts, leaping back from the table. "Crane what the hell!"

You've done it now, he berates himself, a thin wisp escaping back to the confines of the guest.

"Crane!" she yells after him again, flustered before she remembers what she is. Although what IS she, really? but she prays for water, for damp, and the rush comes from her finger tips and the board is outed. Miraculously unscathed, as if it had never been set aflame. The relaxed haze of food and drink evaporates and she storms the stairs, demanding answers. Finds the guest room door shut.

"You answer me," she growls. "You tell me now why you set my table on fire."

"A minute," he rasps, trying desperately to gather himself back together, snatching at all of his wispy tendrils, cursing his outburst and jealousy.

"A what?" she jiggles the door, shooting sparks through the knob before she wrenches it clear out of the way. She pauses a moment for that.

Staring dumbfounded at the knob in her hand with the door attached, ringed with embers of magic. When she tears her gaze away from that amazement she looks to Crane who is just patting his hair in place and turning to meet her eyes sorrowfully.

"My deepest apologies, Abbie," he says, "Spirit nature, unpredictable, at times." he delivers it soundly but there's the slightest quaver in his voice that makes her raise a brow. Come to think of it, he seems more transparent than he's been since yesterday.

"What's going on with you. And don't tell me you've caught a cold."

"We all have our days," he hedges. "Some better than others."

"Everything going on in my life right now I can't handle a spectre with congestion too."

He snorts. ""Believe me, Abigail,"

She shivers at the way his voice curves around her full name. Part of her balks that she's never given him permission to use it.

"What ails me, if anything at all, is soul deep and far more dire than any cold." he looks her over. "Besides which it seems you suffer an affliction of herculean strength."

Abbie blinks, gaze going back to the door she still grips in hand before flushing and setting it back in place, her mind works quick magic setting it back into its hinges. She huffs and wipes her hands on her pants, pretending it didn't happen. "What is it going to take to help you, cross. Because this isn't working. We need to reconnect you with this long lost love of yours."

"Yes. It is the only way to free my spirit." he concedes, a little eager.

"Right, so, help me, what are some of the first steps?"

There should have been leaps and bounds made after so many rounds, he grouches internally. All those hours at the table he had waited for a flicker of memory. Instead had gotten the tale of a usurper sitting in his place. His mind works, slower than usual, still winded from his outburst and energies severely depleted. "Perhaps….." he begins when the phone rings. Abbie regards him, torn, before she dashes away to her room to answer.

He wishes for stillness as she departs, tries to restore himself to calm.

* * *

 

"Abbie?"

"Lee?" her heart flies up in her throat. But it's not the relief and joy she'd felt from his first call. She hates to admit now that thoughts of her husband have been so thoroughly tainted by a malicious figment of her imagination.

"Yeah it's me," he says, his tone hints at confusion. She sounds strange, he thinks, pursing his lips. "What's going on," he continues in a whisper. "You were saying something about the house, what is it?"

"I……"

_"Perhaps, Lee, is more than you thought as well. Or less."_

"Abbie?"

_"Maybe you do not know him, Abbie. It stands to reason that since your powers have awakened you had this awful dream to show you something. A veil has lifted. Your senses are trying to warn you."_

"There's a….. ** _"_**

**_"I'm not letting you go Abbie. Never again"_ **

_"Lee is not who he seems, Abbie. He is not the person you think you know."_

"Honey?"

"I think we have mice." she answers.

"Mice?" Lee says incredulously.

"Or something. It's in the walls."

"Mice. In our walls. In our new, house." on the other end he deflates. She's lying to him. He can feel it, but why?

"I hope it's mice because anything bigger would be out of a horror flick." like a resident ghost, she thinks.

"Abbie, are you sure it's not something, else?" he doesn't know what he's hinting at, honestly, only that he's certain there's something else, off, about their home sweet home. "I feel it too," he adds confidentially, hoping that'll inspire her to talk to him, open up, reach for him.

"Critters, Lee. Must be."

It's as if a door has slammed in his face. "Oh. You're alright?"

"Yeah." she answers, short and clipped.

"Good. Just a few more days, and I'll be home."

"Yep."

He pauses, heartbroken by her sudden coldness and distance. "Well, I've, gotta go. I love you Abbie. With everything in me."

Her heart and mind war. "I love you too, Lee. You know it."

"Yeah, yeah I, I guess I do. Bye."

"Bye."

She watches the phone in her hand and hurts in her core. She's never lied to him, has never had to. Why did she just now?

Because he nearly killed you---in a dream---she snaps back at her mind. Because Crane says your power makes you able to see things. But should you so blindly take a spirit at his word?

He's unpredictable as it is, look what he just did downstairs.

But who do you trust, the man you've known half your  life, or thebit of ether down the hall? __

* * *

There. Corey sighs, she's found the file. Complete with photo and all, her profile as leftenant with Sleepy Hollow police force. She already knows for fact she was FBI through her father. Looking at this picture Corey knows this is the same woman.

Impossibly, she's back. Now…..what to do about it.

* * *

 

"She well?" Danny asks as he rejoins them. His eyes are still red and his voice a bit rough but he seems determined to stay upright.

"Young, beautiful, married." Jenny replies. Danny nods a few times, cracking a smile before he exhales.

"Happy?"

"She seemed it."

"I always wanted to make her happy, Mills. I hope you know that."

The women are kind enough not to interject 'you weren't the only one'

"I know. She did too."

"It was hard for her to just be, gone. So unfinished, and….raw."

Sophie rests a hand on her husbands shoulder. He looks at her gratefully. "I know," she whispers, kissing his cheek.

"I'm glad she's happy. That's all I wanted for her. It seemed unfair to keep living and having things she couldn't. At least now I know she has them. A future. Whether I'm in it or not."

Jenny looks away because she can feel herself tearing up again. "You're a solid man Reynolds. I'm glad Sophie figured that out…..eventually."

Sophie chuckles softly, gripping Danny's hand. "Well what now? Corey's run up on her, sounds like."

"Maybe they'll become, friends. I'd like to see her, just one last time." Danny says. Sophie nods. "Me too. You shouldn't have kept us out Mills."

"Soon as I figure out how to hold areunion with a reincarnation I'll invite you," she snaps. Throwing her head in her hands. A mess. A complicated awful mess.

* * *

" _Fool"_ he mutters to himself. "Blasted, _damned_ fool." He continues to rant as he drags his ethereal feet across the floor, the closest approximation to an aggravated stomp he can handle. Another glance at his transparent hands and he grows more bitter. "Has death made you ill tempered, Ichabod?" he chides himself. "Has years of solitude negated your ability to maintain decorum? To hold yourself a gentleman. She'll be wary of you now---that outburst cost you energy and her estimation of your control. And she can't know--- ** _she can't_** \---"

"Crane?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> someones keeping a secret. 
> 
> But who?
> 
> How dangerous is the truth they hide?


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A moment between Crane and Abbie.
> 
> There I allude to a clue in here if you look for it, have been mentioning it from the get go. first one to guess what the clue is will get an update on this fic AND one of my current unfinished works in progress of their choosing by the New Year. 
> 
> Current unfinished Works include : An Enchanted Revision, Let Me Have This, Fight For It Season 2, Keep It Professional, Afterlove and Destination Unknown. 
> 
> Also short chap. Sorry! 
> 
> Holidays are kicking my tail.

He flummoxes, folding his hands tightly, as much as the air and spirit of him can, behind his back. "Abbie. Once again I must apologize for that…episode."

Her gaze roves over him, assessing, weighing the oddness of him with the oddness of her husband and Abbie feels like she's being backed into a corner of strange. "I won't ask about it if you'll leave what happened this morning----" passing out in the kitchen---having a breakdown---" Alone,"

"Consider it long forgotten." He chews his lip, and then draws a breath. "I, wondered, before you answered the phone, if you might indulge me in an exercise? To aid in my crossing?"

Her fingers itch. Her eyes narrow. "What kind of exercise?"

* * *

 

"Yoga?" she asks perplexed as she enters the room in her tank and leggings, disconcerted by his buttoned up form appearing now in a loose shirt and worn loose trousers. He pushes his short hair back from his forehead self consciously.

Attempting to conjure memory out of chess playing---a more recent tradition of theirs had not proven beneficial. Perhaps an activity from their earlier days could jog her.

"It calms," he assures her, even wincing at the moment remembering how he had been skeptic of her suggestion to him. She eyes him warily, rubs her arms and looks away from him.

Curious, this Abbie seems to mind being seen just a bit more than her past iteration did. Or perhaps it is the weighted heat of his gaze gliding over her arms and form, drinking her in in a way that he had been too foolish and stupid to savour before. She clears her throat. Crosses her ankles and sinks down to the floor.

"Okay." she says slowly. "So, this one first….."

* * *

 

She is glistening with sweat and he is transparent. The effort required of him to follow her movements makes him sluggish and see through, no matter how slow he moves. He fades.

She becomes so lost in the routine, stretching and testing her muscles and limbs, beautiful and glowing in her exertion she doesn't notice when his quips become less audible. When his movements become mere whispers in the air. She is breathing deep, eyes closed, body limber and calm when her mind opens, frees itself.

A face flashes before her with a jolt---the woman she saw when she was perusing the journal. She gasps and her eyes open, expecting Grace to be there in the room with them but instead lays eyes on Crane, a misty likeness across the room from her. "Crane?" her voice cracks, noticing the way his head lolls to the side. "Crane?" she unfolds herself from her current position, crossing the room and reaching for him, realizing the futility of it a moment too late when her hand passes through him as she reaches to shake his shoulder.

His head lifts but only slightly, as if too heavy. "Hmm?"

"Crane?" she fidgets. "You're…..you're fading,"

Beneath the fatigue he is despairing, he is irritated with himself and still angry, but he has no strength to be anything now but vapour, swiftly becoming less.

"Come on…..don't….don't go…."

"It cannot be helped,"he drawls, form beginning to vanish.

"Hey" her hand shoots forward, her body surges with energy "You don't turn my life upside down and then disappear. There's another way. There's always another way"

She feels the pulse course through her.

Alertness surfaces in his ghost pale eyes. He searches her face, hope kindled by her familiar words. He takes a brief solace in it, this too short time in which they have barely been reunited when-----

He snaps back.

Abbie blinks at him, astonished.

He looks down at him self, fascinated before he gutters back to being significantly less corporeal, but at the very least opaque in appearance if not physically solid. He holds his hand out before him, drinking in the colour of his flesh and veins before it continues to fade to a dull pallor but the stops. At the very least, a decent amount of his strength has returned. He doesn't feel nearly as winded as before.

"Abbie," he croaks.

She backs up away from him, almost tripping over her feet. He stands.

"Abbie,"

"You're fine," she blurts. "I'm fine. You're fine, I'm fine, we're fine," her eyes dart about, spooked by the surety that whatever was happening to Crane…..she somehow reversed it. "I need water," she says, chafing her arms as she strides quickly from the room, not once looking back.

Crane watches her, though, and when she is out of sight, his gaze goes to the floor, a silvery strand that trails behind her and across the floor. When he stoops he can see it, silky and whole and not a single frayed end. Not tattered and worn, like the others.

Though it is thin, direly thin, almost invisible to the human eye.

But he sees it, winding along the floor and where it connects to the sole of his ghostly foot.

At last he thinks, gliding along to follow after her.

He smiles.


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> First person to answer was Anniera! so I will be posting an update to "Keep it Professional" soon!.
> 
> BUT  
> since the rest of you had such good answers(and accurate ones) as well! I will update your requested stories over the next few weeks.  
> Order of updates will be chosen as follows.  
> Blackhoney  
> Erika,  
> Yale03
> 
> Pick which stories you want me to update and I will do so in the order provided above! Thanks so much for playing with me----and doing this little quiz thing, it motivates me to finish my other unfinished stories too! :)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I sense a mess coming soon.

Her hand shakes so hard that half the water hits floor and shirt before it makes it to her mouth. She's hot. All over, inside, outside, her being itself, it's burning.

Heat, real heat, sweat beading up on her skin. Heat, real heat, an internal fever that threatens to fry her up from within. Her brain is misfiring and her heart gallops.

She felt something.

Felt something……alien, strange, right, familiar,belonging, gonging with an arrival home and heralding a conflict with her existence.

She felt him.

A part of her lurched and surged in determination to keep him, it came in a lightening flash. It leaves her simmering now. An image of hands clasped across a table. Her own face defiant and pleading with his own, looking defeated, disheveled.

She couldn't lose him. You're in this together, her mind had blared for that instant and the rush came and then he was back. As much as he could be, for a ghost.

She feels before she sees him enter the kitchen with her. That's wrong too, she shudders. She shouldn't be able to feel spirits now but she can conjure energy and powers so who's to say what else her body has in store for her. This day is full of never ending unpleasant surprises.

"Crane," she rasps, throat raw. She's still lit up inside, the power that courses through her too hot still, still liquid fire rushing through her veins, making her alert in ways that scare her. Make her eyes open in ways that sees things she never use to see. All around the room seems to splinter and spider web like broken glass, veils fluttering, lifting, blasting away to show

The skeleton of the house.

The house it was before they wrecked it to rebuild.

The man who lived here, and there, there---

"Abbie?" his eerie chill is welcome this close because it's a contrast to the fire. She doesn't think before she turns around, grasping for him, needing to cool off, needing the opposite of her burning living flesh and needing his ethereal, cold dead form. Some sort of cancellation. She grunts with the impact because of course, she swings her limbs through him, when she whirls around, not on or around him. But it does the trick.

He's made of ice.

It dances straight up to her brain and paralyzes her with the feeling of past, bygone, deceased and the flame in her gutters out, leaving her gasping for breath and trying to steady herself.

"Are you well?"

She doesn't trust herself to speak. Her gaze roves over his face and she finds herself searching. Searching, searching searching.

For answers, clarity. Anything that would explain why in that irrational flash of emotion she'd felt Lee.

* * *

 

Lee staggers, clutching at his chest, lagging behind the group, suddenly winded, his vision blurry.

And he sees her, feels her. But she's never looked like this to him before. With her hair long and sleek----he's only ever known her with her natural curls---her face creased with lines of worry, desperation---and her hand reaching across to clasp----

"Mr. Richards?" one of the girls chime, the only one who checks over her shoulder as the rest of them press on and she jogs over to him. "Mr. Richards are you---"

There's something wrong, he thinks. Overwhelmed by the surge, the reaching grasping that is his but not. "Help!" the girl cries as he crashes down to his knees, face forward. Splitting his forehead.

"Help! Stay awake Mr. Richards, stay awake."

She rolls him over, props him up, and his eyes blink open, the sun is too bright. All he can feel is her fear, that she needs to hold on, to rescue, that she can and will find ways to move mountains to right wrongs----something has changed. She needs----

"Help!" the student screams again as foot steps begin thundering back their way. "Help!"

* * *

 

Crane winces under her heavy scrutiny and swipes at his forehead, overcome by the odd sensation that he's been struck. Pauses to feel wetness.

Pauses to _feel_.

In rapt fascination Abbie watches Crane solidify completely. Her eyes track to the small bleeding gash on his forehead. "Ghosts….can't bleed."

He curses himself for what he does next, it's risky to attempt it but he feels suddenly renewed with vigour. He glamours. He can still feel the sore wetness of it, but to her eye it is invisible. A formidable illusion to hold up against her senses, but it works. "Bleeding?" he asks, perfect picture of puzzlement. And he is puzzled, to be sure. But it benefits him for the time being, if the interloper has been injured. He notices another shining thread running along the other. The progress is so swift and soon he daren't hope and yet…

Abbie frowns. He was bleeding, wasn't he? "Did I say you were bleeding?"

"Yes, you did." he asserts, head cocked curiously. "You've over exerted yourself," he says, warm, coddling, almost as he draws closer and touches her shoulder, shocked but exhilarated by the feeling of her beneath his palm. She reels away.

Never. part of her whispers. A forgotten part. A buried part. He's never.

Never what?

He's never.

Never---

touched you, like that.

The fever is coming on again, she can feel it, an onslaught. "You owe me an answer." she manages finally.

He advances again, bringing with him weight and musk---he didn't have a smell before---she notices with alarm----and tenderness in his face. "An answer?"

"Our bargain, a question for my help. I …..saved you from vanishing just now. You have to answer a question."

"Ask away, Abbie," his voice rumbles, too close too near. She doesn't know when she backed into the kitchen counter but now she has and he's directly in front of her. His limbs are too long. He is too tall. She remembers how he blinked around the room was it just yesterday? blocking her on the stairs. He could catch you. She thinks. Somewhere in her heart shutters. He will catch you.

Maybe she wants to be caught.

She licks her lips and watches his eyes track the movement. "Who were you before you died?"

It stops him dead as he puzzles for an answer. Which time, he almost asks. Who was I as a man? as a Witness? To you? But he promised answers, he never said he would be direct. "A soldier." he replies. "In a hellish heinous war."

"Which army." she counters. "Which war, what year."

He smiles softly at her. "We agreed on one question per day, Abbie. And you have spent it."

"But----"

"You have spent it," he maintains, and with a bow, whisks away.


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Something's been triggered in Abbie and now it won't stop. 
> 
> but what else is happening here?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ALL the apologies on updates. I will be updating Keep it Professional by weeks end.

"Any family history of high blood pressure, diabetes?"

Hazy minds and nothing more, Lee wants to reply but a groan is what escapes instead as he shakes his head from side to side.

The doctor purses her lips. "Well you seem otherwise fine. But we'll keep you over night, to be sure. You're on a drip in case you have any need for medication."

Dimly aware of the doctors words he shifts and feels the intravenous in his hand. Winces because he knows for a fact in spite of his fearlessness--he detests needles.

"But rest now. Do you have anyone we should call?"

But his tongue is heavy and his eyes stubborn.

"He's married" one of the other teachers mention helpfully when the doctor emerges out into the hall. "he's actually not one of our regular teachers. They just returned to Sleepy Hollow. His wife is----"

* * *

 

"Lee Richards, Dare Devil turned history teacher collapsed yesterday afternoon"

The news plays on the television while at her desk.Because the name sounds familiar she glances up at the screen and her breath stops. The eyes.

"No." she says. "How----" she rises from the table she squints at the screen until they flash a picture of his wife. "We are trying to contact his wife but have had no success. If anyone knows what has happened to Abigail Richards, please call----"

Corey scrambles from behind the desk, grabbing for badge, gun, heart racing and thumping as she goes tearing through the office. Around her the other officers glance up. She flashes a hand up at them not to question her. New she may be, but a push over she is not. They all know the new cop is a little striking if not odd. But they don't get in her way.

She blusters down the steps, into her car, putting it in drive, the radio crackles with activity but she's got another concern. The reporter had said there'd been no response at the house.

"You're sure you're alright," she whispers. "No one else here, hiding somewhere, threatening you? holding you captive?"

But now they're saying they can't reach her.

* * *

 

She smiles at him. One of her knowing, secret smiles. The one that always told him she knew something about him even he couldn't understand. His mouth goes dry and he swallows as she crosses the threshold from the hall into the living room. He backs up as she advances, stumbling over his feet and she laughs and it is the sweetest sound, one he has so relished and feels himself smile back at her. "Abbie,"

"Ichabod Crane,"

"I….I have so many, amends, to make, I---"

"You can make them now," she quips, circling around him his skin flushes hot. "You can say sorry in as many gestures and tongues as your verbose heart desires, Crane." She comes to a halt, standing right before him, her soft glittering brown eyes open and welcoming and his heart melts and softens. How had he ever withheld from this creature? How could he have denied himself and her so long the fruits of this bond?

"I should never have left you," he confides, reaching for her hand, caressing it, fingers fluttering, fitting, raising it up to his heart. Her eyes bore into him, as if trying to discern whether she will get the truth of him or another deflection----like that first cowardly one, when she was so raw and bare. He'd jested about chess. He shuts his eyes tight and shakes his head. "Never." he vows. "It was a mistake, Abigail and one I will never dare repeat."

She takes two steps closer, closing space.

"Never."

"Show me," she whispers, a quiet, unsure plea. Her eyes dart and lock with his. "Show, me"

They connect. Their lips collide and his hand curls in her hair and with the other he traps her against his body, hungry, greedy, ungoverned and nothing like the man he has been before. But a wild, ravenous thing. He doesn't let her come up for air. He doesn't let her back away. He bites her lip and she bites him back and the pain is just as good as the feel of the other. He doesn't let her go. He never lets her go.

Her knees start to go weak and he hoists her up, against the nearest wall, abandoning her mouth for her neck, inhaling deep, before he returns with vigour, swallowing every gasp and breath.

He doesn't let her come up for air.

* * *

 

His eyes, blink open in the guest room, jolted. A dream. He'd been having a _dream._ He hasn't _dreamed_ in, he _can't_ \----an ache. A new one now. He glances down, perplexed at his hand where there is a small prick, on his hand. A bead of blood---- _blood again_ \---he feels his energy pulse with the rush of it-----on the back of his hand and the accompanying soreness. The pain. He rises up out of the bed, had he been sleeping? truly? And goes to the mirror not thinking, not accounting for the futile gesture when his reflection catches him unawares. His eyes gaze back out at him. A faint split in his visage, just below his hairline----the cut that bloomed suddenly on him and marvels that he can see himself in the mirror. He tries to quell his excitement. Tries to staunch the ludicrous thought that burbles up to the surface but can it be----he thinks, almost giddy. Can it be that his ill timed bid for restoration, so long ago----that which backfired so tremendously, can be of use to him after all? If there is a connection, even the slightest, well, were he to compound that with Abbie's slow remembering----he can return.

He can have her.

He can be hers.

* * *

 

She read the journal again. Again. Glimmers catch on her memory. Glimpses of before. But they aren't hers, yet. They don't have an anchor in her soul, a recognition. Only she can see the walls of her own home quiver and quake, shifting and bending to show her things if she would look long enough, but she is unnerved. The minute he disappeared the fever came roaring back and it won't break this time and she fears she's losing her mind. She rocks to her knees with her eyes closed, warring with the sensations that kick up in her heart. The floating, untethered uncertainty of her being. She needs a rock, she needs something solid. She has tried to summon Crane but after he vanished the house went dormant. The spirit energy all but ceased. Except for her, rocked anew with fire just under her skin.

* * *

 

Upstairs he grasps a book and flips the page. It turns to fresh text. He touches his own collar and feels cloth beneath his fingers. Just as quick as the surge comes however, he can sense it's desire to fade. He casts around the room for a tool, any sort of implement while his form will hold and---the letter opener.

* * *

 

Lee hisses, and the doctor looks over, perplexed as they draw near. "Are you alright Mr---" they pause, staring for a moment dumb founded at the fresh cut running lengthwise down his arm.

* * *

 

She knows the journal is trying to tell her something. Show her something. But too many jumbles pieces collide inside of her. She doesn't know how long she's been here, shaking like an addict on withdrawal. The phone has rung but she can't focus long enough to reach it.

* * *

 

Crane feels hope, a well of hope swell within him, and as he solidifies he tenderly fingers another silver strand, winding itself around his wrist.

* * *

 

Corey slams her car door shut and marches up the front steps. She knocks politely but gets no answer. The house seems too quiet. Too calm when there's finally movement inside on the other side of the door.

* * *

 

Abbie's head rose when she heard steps. Felt, steps. Human weight on the floor boards. She barely unfolded herself enough in all her inner conflict, shocking pain in time to see him. Her heart clenches at the sight of the back of him. Solid. Real. _Here_. Another long surprised recognition fluttering to life but still she swims in the muck. Her mind cannot agree to accept the new thing fighting her off inside.

* * *

 

"Can I help you?"

Corey staggers back, down the steps. Hand to her holster. "Officer Corey Reynolds." she introduces herself.

"Ahh, officer." he greets pleasantly. "What brings you by?"

"Disturbance, call." she says uneasily, the hairs on her skin raise. This is not the man on the news, this is not Abbie's husband, Lee Richards.

"No disturbance here," he answers cheerfully. Too brightly.

"Is Mrs. Richards here?"

"Oh yes,"

Corey raises a brow. "May I speak to her?"

The stranger's eyes narrow. "I've told you we're alright, officer."

"And I've told you I had a disturbance call," her voice edged with steel. "And I want to speak with the woman of the house. I have news to deliver to her. Personally."

"I am her husband, you can tell me,"

Corey's heart races. She doesn't know what to do, really. Abbie is a woman risen and this man is here, suddenly and he wasn't the other night.

This is not, cannot be, Lee Richards.

For one thing---This man doesn't have Sophie Foster Reynolds' eyes.

Lee Richard's does.


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is back story and explanation of that last cliff hanger. 
> 
> And if you're wondering about Crane and Lee.

Avery and Peter Foster vanished on an expedition. Walked into a ruin that collapsed and they were lost forever---to the natural world, for some time.

The tunnels were long, twisting and winding. They spent years walking out of one mine or cave before finding themselves in another. They had no need for food, no need for water. But their minds were alert, fascinated, drunk on all of the carvings of civilizations past. Hieroglyphs and symbols, etched in ancient and crude hand, spanning years and centuries. The days were eternal, and the closest approximation of night a cool wind.

They tried, in the beginning to find a way home.

Before whispers and enchantments muddled their mind. Addled them, so to speak, until they forgot about the world they'd left behind. And had grown to love and bond with the endless, timeless, expanses of a world between, underneath and within worlds. Time was fast there. And they aged.

It was a kingdom truly. Running the length and width of the earth itself, this hidden realm lay. Where civilizations had risen and fallen and on which some still stood. Catacombs, and all. They do not know, in which quarter they resided, they do not know how it came to be.

But the sector to which they had most recently come, and called a sort of home, was disturbed. It had been rocked over the months they'd been there. Weary, creaky creatures with hardly any recollection of a life before these fortresses and caves, they were slowly searching for the source of their disturbance.

They carried with them weapons. Old as they were the unpredictably of the fascinating world into which they fell and yielded terror after unexpected terror.

It amazed them how many dormant powers and creatures lay in the depths. Some of which they'd avoided at all cost. Some of which they'd fought and by some luck had managed to slay. Some of which wounded them and darted back into the darkness, away, never to be found.

They were prepared, in their wizened state, to fight, or die, if they should be so lucky, at last. There was one explosion, once, and voices, many voices, and feeling of heat passing beside their chamber as a hidden shrouded, tall figure, a grotesque mummified creature rejuvenating flesh even as he walked past, toward a stair well, and then vanished into roots and tangles of vines.

Later they would hear the muttering and chatter of a creature that was alien to them by then. They'd grown strange to normal human tongue, to english language. Foreign to the tones of a female human voice. They could hear her rant and rave, talking to herself but they could not make sense of it.

Avery and Peter had no desires for trouble or more terrors. All at once the place had gone silent for some time, until there was another disturbance.

An explosion. A storm of debris. A whole cavern blown apart, rippled through with terrible power. It caved walls and shredded the ground on which they walked and threw them over a ledge down to a shore. Terrified, old, broken from the fall. They'd ambled, slowly, to a well. Desperate, addled, had heaved themselves into it, hurtling down into the darkness, screaming in fright---more so terrified that they could scream at all but also because their bodied were changing in that fall.

Limbs broke and snapped back together too hard. Old hair shed and new roots sprouted. Wrinkled skin paved over back to the youth they had before.

And surfaced in a lake. In the bodies they had forfeit while in that enchanted place. Restored entirely to the moment before the caves crumbled around them.

And the little life that was just beginning to take form, before their disappearance, before they vanished from their daughter's life--he would be her brother---returned with them.

* * *

 

They forgot their surname.

They were in tatters and wandering the street, frightened, of the changed world. The colourful, fast, quick world. It was like being reborn. The were still leery of their youth. Of everything around them, so bright, and solid. The sudden pangs of hunger that made them cringe.

And there was the pain, the nagging, horrible unrelenting pain in surging through their heads. Memories and knowledge, jumbled and half remembered being crammed back into their heads. Some things took and others didn't.

They remembered their degrees, but their last name got replaced by some imagery they'd spent days analyzing in the beginning. Recalled discoveries and anniversaries---but lost and muddled in there was their daughter. They knew her name to be Sophie. But scarcely could piece together the features of her face. Barely, if at all, remember the city, state, in which they had left her

The ruin had taken from them vital parts of their identity. Had robbed them even while impossibly prolonging their lives.

They chose their new last name at random. A piece of discarded mail.Daniels, would do. They went to a shelter.

To workshops.

Went through system after system, helping them try to find their way. And when the workers realized Avery's condition, all the more reason to get them sorted, straight away.

During these months a man shared space with the ghost of his love. The love who had been ill used, and one night set herself free.

During these months the newly christened Daniels family were lucky and fortunate enough to adapt, with ferocity, and found a quiet, affordable, decent place, down the street from another family known as the Carvers.

Both women were expecting, although Avery would deliver a month before Mrs. Carver would birth Abigail.

In this period of time, the man left behind would die in a puff of ash, settling, waiting, for a chance to reclaim his life and the love he'd foolishly squandered and lost. Preying upon two young, beautiful teens one night, vying for his chance.

Jealousy had occurred to the spirit first. When he'd broken the beam he'd meant to separate them, injure, even kill, the boy. He would go to her after, faded as he was, twine the fragments that bound them back together, make her remember. Hope flickered in him second.

Some residue clung to him. Something that spoke of a life touched by the supernatural that only he, could see. Perhaps it was the stink of ancient magics that had ingrained in Avery's skin. That still scattered her mind---and what was made worse as she aged. 

The boy was fated. _The_ fated. 

Fated, to _her._

 ** _His_** replacement. 

The youths movements were swift, protective of her, so fast. The beam fell and a nail snagged on flesh.

A shallow cut. Some drops of blood.

He'd ghosted by, hardly thinking, hardly remembering the potency of blood and otherworldly things. Essences and bits of spirit that trickle in and bind. He was too busy, studying her in her new form. Leaving behind a rotted through thread. 

* * *

 

The boy was Lee Daniels.

The scattered memory of Sophie Foster, mother of Corey Reynolds, his sister.

 


	18. Chapter 18

 

"I am her husband,"

Abbie viciously wills her head to cool down, for whatever the hell is riling her up inside to take five because the damn spirit of her resident Ghost has taken on a _solid, form_ , and is clearly visible, and talking to an officer of the law.

And he's _lying to them._

The fire goes to a dull roar, clears her mind enough to rise to her feet and glide up behind him---drawn, to him, out of curiosity or something out of her control---because her feet move to smoothly, and her hand reaches up for his shoulder too easily, as if she's done so before. "Officer Reynolds!" she exclaims. "What brings you by?"

Corey's gaze flickers between them but goes back and sticks to Abbie. _Are you in danger?_ She wants to ask. _Blink once for yes._ But Corey is unsettled, because something about Abbie today seems, well, a little less stable than she was on her last visit. Would Abbie even recognize trouble if she's in it?

 _Think fast, Cor_. "There's been an accident." she says slowly, her mind whirring. How can she make sense of this? The man on the news--Lee Daniels--- resembles her mother. They named Abbie as his wife. Who is _this_ man, then? Is Abbie having an affair? Is he abusive, will he harm her if the truth gets out?

"An accident?"

"Yes," Corey continues, eying the man, a picture of decorum who's blue eyes are stark cold and piercing into her. "It's sensitive." she lowers her voice, inclining her head to Abbie.

"Officer Reynolds," he starts but Abbie shoots a glance at him and intervenes.

"It's alright, honey" she says, smiling warmly at him but even Corey can tell its not genuine. It's strange seeing Abbie this way, watching this odd tug of war play across her features. She oscillates from fondness to suspicion which only makes Corey more sure something isn't, right, in this house. Crane pauses, fingers twitching, but Abbie arches a brow and steel edges into her voice. "Crane. **_It's fine" ._** A clear cut no nonsense authority that doesn't feel native to her at all.

When has she ever had need to be so commanding?

But a light shines in his eyes the moment he hears it, and with a dutiful bob of his head, grudgingly leaves the two women at the door. Corey cranes her neck to make sure before backing away and waving Abbie forward. Abbie bites her lip before stepping out on the verandah, closing the door cautiously behind her.

"Mrs. Daniels?"

Abbie nods wordlessly.

"That man introduced himself as your husband."

Abbie nods again because even in the midst of her inner fire struggle she'd heard him---no sense in lying about it.

"His name?

She answers before she can think to lie. "Ichabod Crane." 

" _He called himself your **husband.**_ " Corey grits out, hoping Abbie will catch her meaning. She averts her gaze, but remains mute. "You can tell me," Corey confides. "Is….is Mr. Daniels….." she chokes to say it because she strongly suspects, however impossible it is, that the man might very well be family butshe goes ahead with this anyway, hoping she'll draw an answer out. "Is Mr. Daniels….abusive, towards you?"

Abbie jolts. "What? no, Lee, Lee has only ever been, kind to me, and loyal, he's never----" _except for that dream_ , her mind hedges but she forces that thought away.

Corey inhales. "So Mr. Crane, is not, your husband."

"No," Abbie gushes hurriedly. Glancing over her shoulder. "No he's not, he's he's not even……" but Abbie stops herself.

"Not what." Corey presses. "Not….is he abusive, Mrs. Daniels? Is….is he holding you here?"

"It's my house he can't be holding me in my own house……"

"I need you to tell me the truth."

"Why are you here." Abbie fires back, defensive. "You said there was an accident----"

"It's on the news that your husband _Lee Daniels_ , collapsed in Washington. He's in the hospital. They've been trying to reach you but to no avail. No, no one called me. But I was just out here, and you said you were fine, and now it's public knowledge your husband is unwell and you're not answering your phone and you must know what that's gonna look like,"

Abbie's head spins. For a moment she thought the officer was trying to help her. A little intrusive yes, but now she seems to be suggesting someone might think, in some, impossible fashion, that Abbie has conspired to _harm_ Lee. "I would never hurt him." she retorts fiercely, shaking with rage. "I _love, him_ , I would never….."

"How long have you known Mr. Crane?"

Abbie falters again. She's damn sure confessing to just recently getting to know her own personal spectre is not going to go well. "Not long," she concedes. "I….I thank you, for coming, to inform me, Officer. Did they say which hospital he's at?"

Corey nods, withdrawing paper and pen as she scribbles down the name. "The number should be online. _Are you sure you're **fine here**_ **"** Corey presses, looking very pointedly towards the house, as if she expects it to combust.

"Why do you keep asking me that"

The officer hesitates. Her parents had tried to shut her down, but she knows the truth. What difference, what connection does it have to now, who knows, but maybe this is her only chance to try. Something isn't natural here. "I don't think you are, who you think you are." she says cryptically and turns on her heel.

Abbie's ears burn and rushes down the steps, halting her at the car door. "What do you know?" she demands, her eyes darting over Corey's face. "Tell me if you know something I---"

"Treasure?" the door swings open and there's Crane. "Are you alright?"

Abbie swallows. "I'm fine, Crane." she smiles encouragingly at him but he doesn't go back inside. He stands there, watching them.

Corey licks her lips and inhales. There's no time to explain her reasoning, nor any proof that this will help in any fashion. "Abbie Mills died in an explosion in 2016. FBI agent, coworkers Sophie Foster and Daniel Reynolds." 

"What---" Abbie stammers, but Crane is already coming down the steps, approaching them. Eyes narrowed, and if Corey didn't know any better she'd say for a moment he.....flickered. 

"They didn't believe me, but I think _he_ knows. You're the only one that doesn't"

That fire roars back within her, surging through her being and her vision swims with faces she knows but shouldn't. "Know what---"

"Officer," Crane bellows, and there is a hint of menace in his tone.

"You're _her_ " Corey ducks into the car, slamming her door and pulls away.

On the paper with the hospital address, she'd written her number as well as her parents.

All she can do is pray Abbie will call.


End file.
